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THE WORLD'S DEBATE 



WORKS BY 
DR. WILLIAM BARRY 

Bearing on the Causes of the War 



HERALDS OF REVOLT. European 
Literature from Goethe to Nietzsche 

ERNEST RENAN ) Second Empire and the 
THE DAYSPRING J Commune of 1871 

THE NEW ANTIGONE. The Inter- 
national and Russia 

ARDEN MASSITER. Rome, Italy, and 
the Battle of Adowa 

THE PAPACY and MODERN TIMES. 

Last Period of The Temporal Power 



THE 

WORLD'S DEBATE 

An Historical Defence 
of the Allies 

BY 

WILLIAM BARRY 



"Magnus ab integro sceclorum nascitur or do" 
Virgil : Eclogue iv. 



GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK 

PUBLISHERS IN AMERICA FOR HODDER & STOUGHTON 



Gibbon, concluding the story of the Crusades, has 
these words — 

"By the command of the Sultan, the churches and 
fortifications of the Latin cities were demolished; a 
motive of avarice or fear still opened the Holy Sep- 
ulchre to some devout and defenceless pilgrims; and a 
mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast 
which had so long resounded with the World's Debate." 

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. vii, chap, 
lix, p. 277. 

/ y> 



TO 

HIS MAJESTY, ALBERT, KING OF THE 
BELGIANS: 

AND TO 

HIS EMINENCE, CARDINAL MERCIER, 
ARCHBISHOP OF MALINES: 

WITH PROFOUND HOMAGE, 
AND HOPE UNDISMAYED. 



Belgium, unhappiest of all conquered lands, 
But happy still in the unconquered soul 
Of thy true King, whose daring self-control 

Affronts the flame, scorn thou its burning brands. 

Look where thy Cardinal lifts holy hands, 

Pleading to righteous Heaven; and in the scroll 
Of Martyrs count him, while thy sons pay toll 

To death undaunted; God will break thy bands. 

Belgium, be proud of Cardinal and King; 
Sceptre and crozier have served thee well; 
They reign who thus do serve; and thou shalt sing 
Thy Chant of Honour, rising from the Hell 
Which tries thy gold in fire; may Freedom's wing 

Lift thee to heights where Peace and Justice dwell! 



TO THE READER 



MY apology for adding another book to 
the literature of the War, and my drift 
in so doing, are indicated on the title-page, but 
will bear a little more expansion, if you, dear 
Unknown, permit me to keep you one moment 
on the threshold while I welcome you in. 

This volume I offer you is a record and a 
witness. It tells in sharp outline, yet I believe 
accurately, what were the contrasted ideals 
and the facts of history out of which our most 
searching, but not less hopeful, situation has 
come to be. And those who, like myself, 
have passed a long life in making acquaintance 
with such facts and ideals, are bound in my 
opinion to share their information among the 
many not so fortunate in their studies, and 
consequently bewildered by a sudden call to 
spend property, life — yea, all they possess — in 
defence of a Cause only faintly discernible to 
them. I condense and I explain the series of 
events on two lines — the one starting from 
Catholic England, the other from old heathen 

vii 



vi ii TO THE READER 

Prussia, both crossing at length like swords in 
battle, to decide which shall be the victorious 
path of the future. So far as I am aware, 
this particular effort at enlightenment has not 
been attempted, or on a scale so large that the 
summing up is yet wanting. 

But when I oppose Catholic England to 
heathen Prussia, my own point of sight is 
fixed. And you, my excellent reader, may 
feel surprise when I assure you that the 
principles for which the Allies are pouring out 
their blood and lavishing their treasure, bear 
the closest affinity to our principles — I mean 
to the constant tradition of the Roman 
Church. Nevertheless, proof and instance are 
not far to seek. The Gospel gives to Caesar 
the things that are Caesar's; but from Csesar 
it withholds the things of God. In our Catholic 
creed there has never been room for the Abso- 
lute State ; and never will such room be found. 
Hence, if the Middle Ages are identified ( as in 
common talk and writing is almost always the 
case) with Catholicism, nothing can be more 
misleading than to fasten the pretensions, 
crimes and philosophy of modern Germany on 
something described as "medieval." Journal- 
ists do this because they are too busy to explore 
beyond the nearest hill. But the Middle Ages 



TO THE READER ix 

might pretty well be defined as the period dur- 
ing which the Holy See fought on behalf of 
freedom against the Absolute State, imperson- 
ated in a succession of German Emperors from 
Henry IV to Louis of Bavaria. The Absolute 
State took to itself its great power and reigned 
in the eminently modern time which we call 
the Renaissance. Names and facts bear me 
out. The Roman Church has numbered 
among the Saints her own Gregory VII, who 
deposed the Franconian Henry IV. She has 
canonised Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, long venerated as champion of 
Church and People until Henry VIII con- 
demned him of high treason and destroyed his 
shrine. She has raised to her altars in our 
days Thomas More, the author of Utopia, 
martyr in defence of Christian citizenship and 
old English freedom. And she calls Joan of 
Arc blessed, the Maid whose mission to de- 
liver France from an alien yoke is thereby 
consecrated for ever. 

Now, if there must needs be divisions, we 
may strive at least to get rid of misunder- 
standings; and that is my chief aim in the 
following pages. Born a Catholic, it was my 
fortune to live and move from childhood in 
the company of men and women whose faith 



TO THE READER 



differed from mine — Anglicans, Dissenters, 
Liberals of many schools of thought; and I 
speak of all these as I learnt to know them, 
not on hearsay. I know England too; and 
with Cardinal Manning I would affirm that in 
our laws and institutions, going back to King 
Alfred and Edward the Confessor, we shall 
detect a spirit, a character, and a tendency 
to ordered freedom, which are profoundly 
Catholic. We are fighting that this inherited 
liberty of the Christian and the citizen may 
not be sacrificed to the Absolute State, which 
is Paganism armed with modern weapons and 
invoking, as Heine prophesied that one day it 
would, its old heathen gods to pull down our 
sanctuaries in ruin. 

Thus 1 wrote in substance ere beginning my 
first chapter, on Lady Day, March 25, 1917. 
Now my last pages are out of hand ; but I feel 
that the half has not been told. Autocracy in 
its assault on Democracy was my subject; but 
my hope was to prove by facts and history 
two things: first, that Absolute Power is 
doomed, and this I show to the conviction of 
all who believe in evidence allowed to tell its 
own tale; and, in the second place, that De- 
mocracy and Christianity ought to recognise 



TO THE READER xi 

each other as by origin and spirit of the same 
nature. My conclusion would have been 
"Justitia et Pax osculata? sunt" ("Justice and 
Peace have kissed"). 

It is my conclusion; none can overlook 
it in the brief "lyrical cry" with which 
The World's Debate ends. Moreover, it runs 
through the volume like the "deep andante 
moving in a bass of sorrow" — such sorrow 
as might reconcile worse misunderstandings 
than the quarrel between those who, to 
my profound grief, are estranged, seem- 
ingly, by their very ideals. But matters so 
grew on me, and events came so thronging, 
to prove the first half of my contention, that 
I had to leave the second shining like the 
Cross in mid-air — the Cross that appeared to 
Const antine — when I would fain have shared 
it as a Sacrament of healing with my readers. 
That Democracy by itself is an outward sign, 
needing to be filled and consecrated with 
Christ's redeeming grace, I have ever held. 
I hold it now. Should the time be given, 
I would endeavour to teach the youthful 
generation, who must take up our inherit- 
ance, that on the Seven Sacraments a perfect 
Humanity may be trained to this life and to 
that which is to come. But now I invite 



Xll 



TO THE READER 



them to read a little history, by way of learn- 
ing how the twentieth century has opened 
with a cataclysm in which the old world went 
down. 

One word more. I have spoken all along 
in the first person, as a spectator of the scenes 
through which my life passed. I could have 
taken the anonymous tone of science. But 
he that has beheld men and cities, and dwelt 
in lands across the sea, may be allowed this 
privilege. It is easier to read him; and for 
myself I look upon it as a duty here and now 
to set my name as a witness to the testi- 
mony I am giving. The cause of the Allies — 
and I mean it as upheld in especial by the 
British Empire, the United States, France, 
and Italy — is the cause of Right and of true 
Civilisation. I pray for its victory and its 
reign. Esto perpetual 

William Barry. 

Leamington, 

May 11, 1917. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



ON the origin of the War, consult official "White" 
and other Books issued by the respective Govern- 
ments. The German has been carefully manipulated, 
and is not trustworthy. 

On problems discussed here (besides works mentioned 
in text) a selection varying greatly m value but more 
or less illustrative of the current literature follows in 
alphabetical order. 

Bailey, W. F. : The Slavs of the War Zone. 

Bain, R. Nisbet: The First Romanovs, etc. 

" Balkanicus " : The Aspiratiqpfis of Bulgaria. 

Bernhardi, F. v. : Germany and the Next War, etc. 

Bloch, J. S. : Modern Weapons and Modern Warfare. 

Buchan, John: "Nelson's" History of the War. 

Bulow, Prince v. : Imperial Germany. 

Cramb, J. A. : Germany and England. 

Dillon, E. J. : A Scrap of Paper. 

Dimnet, E. : France Herself Again. 

Fitzmaurice, Lord : Life of Lord Granville. 

Gardner, M. : Poland; Adam Mickiewicz. 

Halsalle, H. de: Degenerate Germany. 

"How the War Began": Daily Telegraph. 

Johannet, R. : Pan-Germanism versus Christendom. 

Kidd, B. : Principles of Western Civilization. 
xiii 



xiv BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Kropotkin, P. : Memoirs of a Revolutionist, etc. 

Lequeux, W. : The Invasion, etc. 

Morgan, J. H.: The German War Book; War, Its 
Conduct, etc. 

Muir, Ramsay: Nationalism and Internationalism. 

Oliver, F. S. : Ordeal by Battle. 

Pares, B.: Russia and Reform. 

Pears, Sir E. : Forty Years at Constantinople, etc. 

Polish Information Committee: The Case for 
Poland's Independence. 

Sarolea, C: The Anglo-German Problem; How Bel- 
gium Saved Europe, etc. 

Sladen, D.: The Truth about Germany; Confessions 
of Frederick the Great. 

Soloviev, V. : War, Progress, and the End of History. 

Sykes, Sir M.: The Caliph's Last Heritage; Dar- 
Islam. 

Treitschke, H. v. : History of Germany in Nineteenth 
Century; Life of Frederick the Great. 

Usher, R. G. : Pan-Germanism. 

Watson, Seton: Teuton, Slav, and Magyar. 

Wile, W. : Men Around the Kaiser, etc. 

Zangwill, I. : The Principle of Nationalities. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

The Roots of Anarchy . 1-24 

To-Day born of Yesterday — October 24, 1648, to January 
30, 1649 — Present War sprang from these Hundred 
Days — Treaty of Westphalia — Execution of Charles I — 
Doom of Holy Roman Empire; — Luther and Albert of 
Brandenburg, or, Prophet and Sword — The Caesar- 
Pontiff — This the Quarrel between Rome and Berlin — 
As also between the Nations and Germany — Europe 
after the Reformation — Macaulay on Losses and Gains 
of the Catholic Church — Outcome: Latin Christendom 
narrowed, Age of Despots flourishes — But England be- 
gins War of Freedom. 

CHAPTER II 

How England Solved Her Kaiser-problem . 25-44 

The "red star, Tyrannicide" from Charles I to Archduke 
Franz Ferdinand — Tragedy of the King's Evil — Law of 
Tribe and Law of Justice — Milton praises the "Sentence 
of a Legal Judicature" — Charles Stuart and William II 
hallucinated by Dream of Divine Right — Milton's " De- 
fence of the English People" — This Nation discovers 
(1628-1688) the Balance of Obedience and Authority — 
Kaiserism, a crowned and sceptred Unfaith — The King 
rules by Law, not by Will — Regicide no Remedy — The 
British Constitution become a World-Pattern — Lead- 
ing the Nations to Victory. 

CHAPTER III 

Prussia's Rise and Claim to "Kultur" . 45-67 

Tribute to my German Master and to the Germany I know 
— Modern Prussia is not that Germany — Outside the 
Western or Roman Civilisation — Heine's absurd Eng- 
lish "man-machine" — Carlyle's account of the Prussian 

xv 



xvi CONTENTS 



PAGE 
origins — "Unsmiling Pomerania" — The Burgrave of 
Numberg grows into the Electorate of Brandenburg and 
makes himself a king (1417-1701) — Frederick the Great 
sums the story — Teuton against Roman — Distinguish 
Civilisation, Bildung, Kultur — Aristotle defines the 
first, Goethe the second, what is the third? — Reply, Kul- 
tur is mechanism made perfect — Prussia the War-State 
of Europe as Sparta the War-State of Hellas — Carlyle 
the apologist of Prussian Kultur; let us look at the Facts. 

CHAPTER IV 

The Royal Caste and Realism in Politics . 68-89 

Carlyle's "Frederick" a national Disaster — Macaulay 
gives the Verdict of Conscience on Prussian perfidy as 
"reason of State" — The Great Elector's "spiral move- 
ments" with "private aim sun-clear to him" — German 
princely "Pacts," sale of peoples, brutalising of soldiers 
— The heart of Prussian Kultur is moral cowardice — 
Slave-States and Royal Caste — "Happy Austria, wed"; 
Maria Theresa's thirty-nine Titles, not yet Empress — 
The Failure of Austria — "Savage Prussia, strike hard" 
— Remarkable Retrospect and Prospect in 1773 — Fred- 
erick the Great founds modern Germany in Seven Years 
War — But so does Napoleon, whom "old Fritz" did not 
anticipate — Their politician was Machiavel, their phil- 
osopher Hobbes — The Absolute State. 

CHAPTER V 

From Napoleon to Bismarck .... 90-111 

Attempted suicide of Europe since 1914 — Problem of 
Feudalism, Democracy, Religion — Course of history as 
reflected in Frederick, Napoleon, Washington, all con- 
temporaries — The outcome of French Revolutionary 
Wars— The Congress of Vienna (1814-1815)— Reign of 
Metternich till 1848— Thirty Years lost to Freedom- 
Prussia's Feudal Autocracy — The Hohenzollern "Leg- 
end" — Growth of Pan-German feeling — Prussia's En- 
largement in 1815 — Lethargy of British and French 
Statesmen — The "Year of Revolutions," 1848 — Days of 
Frankfort — German Liberals fail utterly — Bismarck's 
apprenticeship. 

CHAPTER VI 

Reaction Finds its Captain-General . 112-139 

The European situation in 1862; policy of Napoleon III 
and of Queen Victoria — Bismarck's Contest with Prus- 



CONTENTS xvii 



sian Parliament; the "possible Strafford" wins — Last 
period of History from 1794 to 1914 has five stages: 
Napoleon I, Metternich, Napoleon III, Bismarck, Em- 
peror William II — Britain's action dictated by its Em- 
pire; yet by the "Custom of England" it would never 
stand a Tyrant of Europe — The Crimean War as an il- 
lustration — Napoleon "the Little" a hybrid of Liberal 
and Autocrat; he did not make Italy and he led to Sedan 
— Bismarck the "Man of Iron"; forecasts policy at 
Frankfort; compared with Metternich — Dominates 
King William; means to supplant Austria; Wins the 
Elbe Duchies and seaboard for Prussia — Schleswig- 
Holstein seizure a prelude to the Great War — Queen 
Victoria follows her dead Husband's policy. 

CHAPTER VII 

Austria, Rome, and France — The Crisis of 

the Century 140-167 

Bismarck secures Russia by helping to coerce Poland in 
1863 — He entangles Napoleon III at Biarritz — In 1861 
the Tsar emancipates the Russian serfs, and Lincoln 
opens the American War of Liberation — Austria, though 
"ramshackle," survives — The Seven Weeks War (1866) 
— Hyde Park palings thrown down — Bismarck under- 
takes to ruin France — Napoleon's troubles in Mexico 
and Italy — French victory at Mentana makes Vatican 
Council possible — My first visit to Paris; three views of 
the Tuileries Gardens — A tribute to Rome and Italy, 
"Salve, magna parens!" — Rome in various lights — 
1870, the climacteric year of the nineteenth century — 
The Vatican Council — Bismarck understood neither 
Catholicism nor Democracy — War declared by France 
— The "Terrible Year" — Third Republic — Scenes from 
the Fall of Rome and end of the Temporal Power — 
Britain looks on. 

CHAPTER VIII 

The Bismarckian Era 168-191 

Ruskin on the German character — Bismarck's Peace 
meant an enduring "state of war" — England protects 
Belgium — What was the Commune of 1871, according 
to Ruskin? — The "Red Week" of May, and burning of 
Paris — Socialists, Communists, Nihilists — England's 
mistake — Bismarck's three games of chess all succeed — 
Germany wakes to the Pan-German idea — Turkish Mis- 
rule ; Disraeli refuses the Berlin Memorandum ; why? — 
Russo-Turkish War; Treaties of San Stefano and Berlin; 
"Peace with Honour" meant Balkan troubles and wars 



xviii CONTENTS 



down to the Great War, itself included — Sunday, March 
13, 1881, sees Alexander II shattered in Petersburg — 
Great Social Movement all over Europe — Bismarck 
fails in his Kulturkampf with Rome; finds Leo XIII 
more than his match; goes to Canossa — His Fall. 

CHAPTER IX 
Enter Kaiser Wilhelm 192-212 

The new Emperor's obsessions and "wild dedication" of 
himself " to unpath'dVaters" — Imperial bagman on be- 
half of the Reich, but in the grand style — The Pan-Ger- 
man idea becomes explicit and paramount — German 
Socialism made a lightning-conductor — "I will be 
Saviour of my People" — Peaceful penetration of Free- 
Trade Britain — The War proves Pan-Germanism not an 
idle dream — Immense prosperity of the Fatherland — 
The Boer War, prelude to present Armageddon — Jame- 
son Raid and Kruger Telegram — Foreign opinion dead 
against England; who pays? — Queen Victoria passes, 
and with her the Europe we have known — The Kaiser 
spies and plans. 

CHAPTER X 

The Matter op Britain 213-235 

Peace in South Africa — Prophecy after the Event — Ed- 
ward VII ends the Isolation of England — Dangers fore- 
seen but not heeded — The King's action construed by 
Berlin logic as an attack on Germany — France appar- 
ently going down — Anti-militarism — The Teutons / 
charge on others the crimes they themselves commit — 
Louvain as instance — Bismarck's foreign and colonial 
policy — From 1903 the Kaiser prepares a "brutal of- 
fensive" — Drum-fire of phrases, Navy League, and to 
wrest the trident from Britain stupendous naval esti- 
mates, with Heligoland as new Gibraltar, and Kiel Canal 
finished — Preliminary invasion of our lands and waters S 
— British Cabinets, despite warnings, refuse to get ready 
— Inviting aggression — Tardy North Sea Fleet inade- 
quate; Rosyth, voted in 1905, still not completed in 
1914 ; Forth and Clyde Canal not to be at all — This was 
Britain's assault on Germany when war broke upon us. 

CHAPTER XI 

Lightning out of the East .... 236-260 



© 



The Kaiser as protector of Moslems, and in effect suzerain 
of Abdul Hamid in 1898— Teutons and Turks— The 
Young Turks and "Huriyeh" — Austria, violating Ber- 



CONTENTS xix 



lin Treaty, annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908; 
while the Kaiser "in shining armour" holds back the 
Tsar; "potential energy" never wants war, but threat- 
ens it — Russia's fatal conflict with Japan inspired from 
the Wilhelmstrasse — The Balkan League springs up 
armed in 1912; collapse of New Turkey; 1913, the "Year 
of Redemption" — Foul Treachery of Bulgarian King; 
second Balkan War, instigated by Austria; humiliation t/^ 
of Bulgaria; Treaty of Bucharest — Franz Ferdinand re- 
joices that the Pan-Slav dream is at an end — Serbia the 
Slav Piedmont; menace to "ramshackle" Empire — 
Vienna meditates hostilities in 1913 — A Bulgarian vi- 
sion — Date of the coming Great War fixed, not later 
than August 1914 — The Murders at Sarajevo, June 28 
of that year. 

CHAPTER XII 

Belgium Saves Europe 261-281 



s 



"Delenda est Austria," why the Dual Empire must go — y 

Its futility and falsehood to its mission — The ultima- 
tum to Serbia was a deliberate crime against the world's 
peace — The Archduke's murder a pretext, made or 
pounced upon, and the negotiations from July 23 to Au- 
gust 1, 1914, craftily set on a wrong tack — Sir Edward 
Grey's innocent diplomacy, and refusal of our pacificist 
Government to take a view of realities — War invited by 
the helpless condition of Western Powers — "Infamous 
proposals" made to us from Berlin — Rejected, but in 
terms too mild — Kaiser's ultimatums to Paris and 
Petersburg — He declares War on Russia, August 1— 
"Black Saturday" in London. Cabinet compelled to 
decide by Tory pressure on August 2 — Belgium saves 
the conscience of Europe by refusing to violate its own 
neutrality — The law, the facts, and the situation — King 
Albert appeals to France and England — Scenes in the 
British Parliament linking it with Long Parliament at 
its height — The "scrap of paper," and "necessity has no 
law" — Britain at war with Germany from midnight, 
August 4 — The perfect tragedy. 

CHAPTER XIII 

The Triumph of "Kultur" .... 282-301 

Germany, "Injustice in arms" — Invasion of Belgium — 
Schrecklichkeit — Ordered by GermanWar-Book; Moltke 
and Bismarck commend it — Burning, pillage, slaughter, 
rape, havoc, inflicted on non-combatants — The "Lesson 
of Louvain"; flight of myriads to Holland. France, 
Britain — Seven millions starving but for relief from Al- 



xx CONTENTS 



PAGE 
lies and U. S. A. — Logic of destruction followed by mod- 
ern Huns from 1914 to 1917 in every shape — But the 
Belgian resistance defeated German plan — Seven weeks 
— July 23 to September 10 bring decisive results — The 
March of the Huns to within twenty miles of Paris — 
Government retires, September 3, to Bordeaux — Battles 
of the Marne, following on retreat from Mons, end in Al- 
lied victory — Germans fall back on the Aisne; war of 
parallel positions foreseen by Bloch ensues — Time, the 
"asset," passes over to our side. Great rally of British 
Commonwealths and India to Britain — Ireland's hope 
and glory — Why so long thwarted? — Alliances: Turkey 
and Bulgaria join Central Empires — The Belgian King 
and Cardinal; heroic stand of both; Cardinal Mercier 
condemns the Kaiser — Lusitania Day. 

CHAPTER XIV 

America Passes Judgment 302-325 

My book returns to its beginning — America in reserve, as 
belonging to the years 1648-1649 — Maryland, the first 
to set up religious freedom — Catholic teachers limit 
State-powers — First Amendment to American Consti- 
tution, 1791, rejects the Caesar-Pontiff established by 
Treaty of Westphalia — Bearing of all this on our War of 
Liberation — A pilgrimage to Athens and Marathon — 
Greek and American Liberty meet on the field where 
Persian autocracy was defeated — My forecast in Janu- 
ary 1915 of the judgment of Washington — The world's 
agony — Russia throws down the Tsardom — While the 
Allies observe laws of Neutrality, the Germans utterly 
abolish them — Expostulations from U. S. A. unavailing 
— President Wilson requests the belligerents to state 
their terms; the Germans refuse, the Allies comply — 
On April 2, 1917, the President holds before Congress 
the "State-trial of an Empire" — Indictment, verdict, 
sentence; close of the World's Debate — Lincoln and 
Wilson, Good Friday, 1865, 1917. 

CHAPTER XV 

The Vision of Peace 326-332 

America joins Britain's League of Honour; the restoration 
of Free Institutions; Macaulay's witness — From the 
Tribe to the City — Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, or Light, 
Law, Revelation — Union of these will bring Peace — 
Rome as world-centre and Golden Milestone — The Holy 
Roman People, or Church and Democracy reconciled — 
A dear price for the New Age paid in the lives of dear 
friends — My dead soldiers and what they have won for 
us by dying — Prometheus shall at last be unbound. 



CHAPTER I 



The Roots of Anarchy 



TO-DAY is born of yesterday, but as if 
at once proud and ashamed, too often 
it disowns its pedigree. Not so the scalds, 
or prophets, or by whatever name they 
go, who "look before and after" — to them 
it is a tale of insight and foresight and the 
present was already contained in the past, 
tanquam in causis; whence they know that 
the future, could they see it, is here and now 
a potent reality, or, like the view that we 
catch in a glass of things behind us, it has a 
twofold being, real and ideal. To question 
this would be to make of history a chaos, "a 
mighty maze" and yet "without a plan." The 
fact is far otherwise. By fate and free will 
we came into the battle, long since dimly 
foreseen, which will fix the opening years of 
the twentieth century as beginning a new 
time, while ending the old one in the gloom 
of thunder and eclipse. Reader, I am going 
to ask you candidly, with me not less candid, 

l 



2 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

I promise you beforehand, to consider the 
wide historical landscape on which Arma- 
geddon unrolls its tragic "Haupt-und-Staats- 
action" — or play of Heaven and Earth. And 
we will have written above the stage these 
lines from our all-seeing poet — 

"Either there is a civil strife in Heaven; 
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods, 
Incenses them to send destruction." 

I will not keep you with an interminable 
prologue. Remarkably enough, two happen- 
ings there are, of which all men have heard or 
are now feeling the consequences, brought by 
the Supreme Power we call Providence into 
the compass of a Hundred Days, at the end 
of 1648 and the beginning of 1649. These 
great events, so near in time to each other, 
stand yet memorable as well-heads of the 
Modern Europe into which we were born. 
One was the signing of the Treaty of West- 
phalia on October 24, 1648. The other was the 
execution of Charles Stuart, king of England, 
on January 30, 1649. This high mountain 
range forms the watershed of Modern History. 
The Treaty dissolved Medieval Europe into its 
parts; the execution did symbolically and in 
subsequent deed, as old Boswell of Auchin- 



THE ROOTS OF ANARCHY 3 

leek growled, to Johnson's indignation, "gar 
kings ken they had a lith in their neck." The 
Holy Roman Empire and Absolute Monarchy 
were doomed from those two days, October 24, 
1648, and January 30, 1649. 

To bear these dates in mind together should 
not be impossible. In our elementary schools, 
where a vague Royalism or Jacobitism hangs 
about still, the day and year of Charles's 
"taking off" are taught as indispensable to 
knowledge; but the Treaty of Westphalia 
fares differently. It belongs to continental 
nations — those queer foreigners of whom we 
need learn nothing except when they invaded 
us, or we them. Our English History is a 
water-tight compartment. Beyond it the 
people never look; and with how little out- 
side it have our statesmen as a rule considered 
themselves bound to be acquainted? Hence 
the War, its surprises, its length, and its 
hazards — unnecessary if England had been 
ready with a store of facts bearing on our 
relations to Europe at large. I count myself 
a perfectly loyal subject. But I see no ground 
why that should hinder me from being a 
"good European." Had our governing men 
been of that disposition, I say not the war 
could never have come to pass. In my view, 



4 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

hoc erat in fatis, it was bound to come to pass. 
But the British Empire would have beheld it 
moving on from afar and made preparation 
accordingly. 

Now, to take the events of 1648 and 1649 
in order as things fell out, first, what did this 
foreign Treaty of Westphalia signify? The 
English nation, busy in plucking down Charles 
and setting up Cromwell, was not represented 
there. By and by she would meet its con- 
sequences on many a field of battle. Poland, 
Muscovy, and Turkey were likewise absent. 
By weight of metal the chief contracting 
parties were Austria, which had finally suffered 
defeat, and France and Sweden, which had 
beaten her, in the Thirty Years War. Peace 
now came to seal the victory of West and 
North. Peace, after Central Europe had 
been wasted by sword, fire, and famine, all 
ministers of wrath in this greatest and last of 
the wars named of Religion! Henceforth in 
German lands not ruled as hereditary by the 
House of Habsburg, three Confessions might 
live side by side: the Lutheran, the Calvinist, 
and the Catholic — on certain terms. If a 
prince changed his religion he forfeited his 
dominions. But instead of one central author- 
ity, as hitherto, the "elected Roman Kaiser," 



THE ROOTS OF ANARCHY 5 

who was also German king, now every petty 
lord became a sovereign, and the Fatherland, 
thus parcelled out, fell beneath the sway of 
some three hundred despots, all claiming to 
reign, temporal alike and spiritual, "von Gottes 
Gnaden," by the grace of God. The Empire 
still continued in name; but anarchy is the 
true account of it from henceforth until, smit- 
ten to death by Napoleon, it expired with ig- 
nominy in 1806. The balance-wheel of the 
old European system had been shattered by 
the Reformation ; and at Minister the attempt 
was made to set up a fresh equilibrium, but 
the thing was not to be done. 

From the year 1648 Germany sank lower 
and lower. For nearly a hundred years it 
became in the ruling classes an appanage of 
France. Its religion, literature, and social 
aims lost all native vigour. Of course, no 
German prince or poet was capable of writing 
as Frenchmen wrote, or of rehearsing in any 
fit manner at Herrenhausen the graces of 
Marly and Versailles. But there was com- 
pensation in keeping. While Austria, faithful 
to its name, went on pressing eastward, 
along the Danube and against the Turk, a 
new Power, of origin somewhat humble, as 
derived about 1170 from a certain Conrad of 



6 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

Hohenzollern in Suabia, not far from the 
Lake of Constance, began without distinctly 
meaning it to aspire, as ambition will, to the 
high place left empty by the incapable House 
of Habsburg, summed up long afterwards by 
Bismarck in a scornful phrase, "those idiotic 
Archdukes." This new Power was Lutheran 
Prussia. 

We can try to remember so much, at all 
events. Luther has four centuries of German 
history (1517-1917) to his account. Luther, 
a strong man, on any reckoning; "a genial 
ruffian," according to Huxley; a mystic in love 
with that very beautiful book of the spirit, 
the "Deutsche Theologie"; a monk armed 
at all points in the scholastic but curiously 
modern views of the Englishman, William 
of Ockham; a master in his native tongue, 
idiomatic, racy, humorous; the creator, not 
without help from older Catholic versions, of 
the German Bible; a Billingsgate polemic, 
whose words and illustrations are humiliating 
to man's self-respect; a fanatic, an hypochon- 
driac, a born adversary of Rome — this was 
the modern Hermann, who broke the power 
of St. Peter in Deutschland as that ancient 
Arminius had cut to pieces the legions of 
Augustus. A strong man, I repeat ; whether 



THE ROOTS OF ANARCHY 7 

a great man will be decided by our standard 
of greatness. A demonic force, it appears to 
me; and I rank him with Milton's Satan, 
with Goethe's Mephistopheles, as a "wondrous 
son of Chaos," not of Cosmos, in league with 
darkness rather than the light. He stalks 
out of the Norse mythology like a Frost- 
Giant ; or he is Fenri's wolf opening capacious 
jaws to swallow down the sun. Pardon me, 
Reader; but I am by choice and temperament 
a lover of the South and its fine order, clear 
heaven, and wine-coloured seas; these are my 
preference — 

" TCOVTLOiV T€ KVyLOLTOiV 

avrjpidjjLOV T^Xacr/za, 7ra 4 u/x^r6p re 777, 
kolI rbv iravb'KT'qv kvkKov 'r)\Lov KaXco." 

Luther broke North from South; he threw 
Germans back upon their fierce old barbaric 
traditions of the Teutoburgian Forest, and 
thus. he will be seen in historical perspective 
as the real founder of Prussia. He looked 
round for a sword. Most extraordinary it is, 
but a fact, that such a sword was already 
forging to his hand, if he did but know it, by 
another monk, but this time a soldier, bound 
under vows of celibacy and of service to Holy 
Church, the High Master of the Teutonic 
knights, Albert of Brandenburg, his junior 



8 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

by seven years (Luther, 1483; Albert, 1490). 
This Hohenzollern converted "Prussia," which 
he held simply in trust for the Order, into his 
own hereditary Dukedom, and made the con- 
senting, i. e. newly Protestant knights, his 
vassals by the still quasi-monastic name of 
"Junkers" — a name we have often heard 
since August, 1914. The business involved 
a feudal submission of this stolen "Ducal" 
Prussia to Sigismund of Poland, which was 
done at Cracow, October 8, 1525. 

The sword of a future Germany was now 
laid on the anvil, to be smitten by many strokes 
and annealed in blazing fires, until it would cut 
as sharp as any magic Excalibur. The seeming 
Peace, but veritable anarchy, of Westphalia 
put it edged and tempered into the hands of the 
Great Elector. When he laid it down, Bran- 
denburg, under the style and title of Prussia, 
was ready to proclaim itself a kingdom. That 
is the next memorable date, January 18, 1701. 
I will join it straightway with another, which 
many surviving like myself can call to mind- 
January 18, 1871, when William I, King of 
Prussia, was acclaimed German Emperor in 
the Palace of Versailles by the assembled 
kings and princes of the two groups, north 
and south of the Main. In the Hall of 



THE ROOTS OF ANARCHY 9 

Glories dedicated to Louis XIV, Germany 
took her revenge upon France for the dis- 
memberment effected in Westphalia upon 
the old Empire. 

Such, then, is the significance to us of that 
Treaty; it means the rise of Prussia. Note 
well how the new Empire began, for thereby 
hangs the whole story. From an Order of 
Catholic military monks, resembling the 
Knights of St. John, their landed possessions 
were forcibly seized by the Grand Master, 
who was sworn to protect them against all 
comers. He annexed this great heritage to 
his own family for ever. And thus he made 
a secular State from property and dominions 
which had long been consecrated to the 
sanctuary. But observe that, in ceasing to 
be a monk, Albert of Brandenburg became a 
pope. I am speaking literally. According 
to the terms of the famous compact among 
Teuton princes, finally and formally sealed 
at the Westphalian Treaty, Cujus regio, ejus 
religiOj, the land-ruler fixes the land's religion. 

What can that matter to us now? you may 
ask. In this way it matters. We have been 
astonished, nay, perplexed, by the sheep-like 
docility of an entire people to any and every 
dictate of its Government. That those mil- 



10 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

lions should have no conscience of their own; 
that when bidden not only to perpetrate but 
to justify atrocities in their nature most re- 
volting, Germans of all ranks should without 
a murmur have thus prostituted their very 
souls, is a thing to be accounted for; and 
here is the explanation. The State, as Luther 
conceived of it, was the one Divine authority 
left as a public power in the world. To resist 
it under whatsoever provocation was a sin 
unto death. His language on the Peasants' 
Rising in 1525 is well known, and so violent 
that I would rather not quote it. For I am 
not composing an invective against Luther. 
All I wish at this point is to show that, on 
his principles, the only visible Church is the 
State, and consequently the only visible Pope 
is its head. We are familiar with a doctrine 
and practice like unto this from the proceedings 
of Henry VIII, who, claiming the power of 
the keys, exercised his prerogatives over and 
over again in drawing up variations of belief, 
and laid upon his subjects the duty under 
formidable penalties of accepting them. 

But in Germany the State has been a never- 
dying Henry VIII. It has never ceased to 
command that public opinion should follow 
its decrees in all things. The ugly name for 



THE ROOTS OF ANARCHY 11 

a still uglier thing is Csesaro-Papism. Every 
little tyrant, reigning over a few square miles 
and a handful of Germans bound to "his 
Transparency," was a Pontifex Maximus, 
who could turn these pliant subjects from 
Lutheran to Calvinist and back again, when it 
suited his policy or his pleasure. Thus Luther 
and Lutheranism granted to the Prince all 
that was refused to the Pope. 

This conception of the King-Pontiff is 
fundamental in the Prussian State. It is 
also heathen, and very old. It is profoundly 
anti-Christian. Catholics and Puritans have 
both stood out against it in the name of the 
New Testament. As for modern English- 
men, to such a distance are they removed 
from reverence to "His Most Sacred Majesty," 
illustrated, as Carlyle would say, by a Nell 
Gwynne and Charles II, that a present claim 
on the part of Kaiser T *Yilhelm to be Heaven's 
Vice-gerent stirs them to scornful laughter. 
Among the grounds on which they feel dis- 
posed to think him mad — at all events, like 
Hamlet, "north-north-west" — by no means 
the least persuasive appears to them an ex- 
travagance so far out of fashion, as well as 
in itself ridiculous. When in proclamations 
not merely to his soldiers but to the Poles 



12 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

whom he trampled down, or whom he is 
invading, this play-actor declares with his- 
trionic gesture that the Lord has sent him, 
as if he were the Messiah, good sense judges 
that he might with equal decorum announce 
himself as "Brother of the Sun and Moon." 
Rightly so; but here begins the first lesson 
of the dreadful War Service we are cele- 
brating; and we have not learnt it yet. 

To us, for reasons I will give in due course, 
the Csesar-Pope is an outworn superstition. He 
lies buried in the coffin of Charles I. But 
to the Teuton race he is yet alive; he is their 
Commander of the Faithful, the Caliph of 
Berlin, and armed with a two-edged sword. 
He has never laid aside the High Mastership, 
not now of an Order but a Nation, which 
consecrates him to his sacred office. Wilhelm 
is a stage-player, indeed, deserving to be 
compared with Nero rather than with Cali- 
gula; but on that account he seizes readily 
and renders dramatically the part assigned to 
him as Hohenzollern, as Deutscher Kaiser; 
and he proclaims the story of his birth and 
heaven-descended dignity, in perfect good 
faith, to a listening but scandalised earth. 

Wars led by a Commander of the Faithful 
are, in effect, wars of religion. If Westphalia 






THE ROOTS OF ANARCHY 13 

saw the end of the last, we are looking on at 
the progress of another which, in more than 
one point, resembles and repeats it. The 
sword that Luther desired, wrought by Albert 
and his successors into a mighty eater of men, 
has grown to be the War-Machine behind 
which Wilhelm, Emperor and Pope, rides 
into battle. He takes with him a nation of 
slaves and believers. He calls upon "our old 
German God" to help him by right of clan- 
ship. These follies have the fury of madness 
in them. But we, in our simplicity, still fancy 
them put on, whereas they are the innermost, 
subconscious conviction of a people broken 
to servility during centuries, incapable of 
undoing the spell which holds them down. 

Now consider the second thing fixed by 
the Westphalian Treaty of 1648. This was 
the recognition of boundaries, hereafter pretty 
nearly inviolable, between the Roman Church 
and the Churches of the Reformation. No 
writer has told the story in fewer or more 
effective words than Macaulay, whose essay on 
Ranke's History of the Popes comes nearer to 
philosophic thought than all the other pages 
he covered with phrases and pictures. There 
are those who affect some disdain of the 
eloquent Whig, descended from Norse and 



14 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

Celt, as though his utterances were the flourish 
of kettledrums in an orchestra. But Macaulay, 
the man of letters, had seasons when he pro- 
phesied; and this hour devoted to Von Ranke 
caught him up to Pisgah heights, whence he 
surveyed the past lying at his feet and the 
future very far off. He had no metaphysics; 
the question which he opened concerning Re- 
ligion, whether, viz. it holds or exhibits any law 
of progress, Macaulay was incapable of answer- 
ing. His temper, cast in a secular mould, never 
could bear visionaries. Yet in this one essay 
there is a touch of the visionary. Why did 
Rome lose what she lost at the Reformation? 
Why, fifty years from Luther's uprising, could 
Catholicism "scarcely maintain itself on the 
shores of the Mediterranean"? Why, again, 
one hundred years after it, could "Protestant- 
ism scarcely maintain itself on the shores of 
the Baltic"? And why the settlement which 
was finally reached in 1648? "When, at 
length," says Macaulay, "the Peace of West- 
phalia was concluded, it appeared that the 
Church of Rome remained in full possession 
of a vast dominion which in the middle of the 
preceding century she seemed on the point of 
losing. No part of Europe remained Pro- 
testant, except that part which had become 



THE ROOTS OF ANARCHY 15 

thoroughly Protestant before the generation 
which heard Luther preach had passed away." 
I am not proposing, at my present stage, to 
submit reasons for these things which travel 
farther than those alleged by Macaulay. Later 
on, that task shall be attempted. Our concern 
just now is with Rome's actual circumference 
as it was traced at the Westphalian congress. 
It is a remarkable one. If we take the map 
of Europe, we shall see that it lay very largely 
within the lines traced by the Emperor 
Valentinian in the year a.d. 364, as dividing 
the West from the East. On one side we 
reckon Thrace, Asia, and Egypt; on the 
other, which is ours, Illyricum, Italy, the 
Gauls, Britain, Spain, and Africa. The prov- 
ince of Illyricum included classic Greece or 
Hellas, on portions of which the Venetian 
Republic held a faltering grasp until 1715. 
Africa had long fallen a prey to Islam and 
nondescript Barbarians. The Britons, though 
more under influences emanating from Geneva 
than from Wittenberg, were fiercely anti- 
papal; yet the Church of England showed a 
significant spirit of compromise, and gloried 
in its Via Media. But Italy, the Gauls, and 
Spain kept faithful to Rome. The Low 
Countries were almost equally partitioned, as 



16 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

to numbers, between Catholics and the Re- 
formed. Switzerland was in much the same 
condition. And the Rhine, the Main, the 
Danube had become, though not altogether or 
exactly, bounds which the Roman missionaries 
found it hard to cross. Bohemia was Catholic; 
Hungary had its Dissidents. Ear away from 
the purview of Rome, to whose empire it was 
never subdued but whose faith it embraced with 
enthusiasm, Ireland, soon to be given over to 
"the curse of Cromwell," was earning by its 
afflictions the title of the Martyr-Nation. As 
remote in the Middle East as Ireland in the 
North- West, another people resembling the 
Irish by their military spirit, their eloquence, 
brilliancy, and enormous difficulties in setting 
up a State on firm foundations — I mean the 
Poles — were Catholics too, and with them we 
must count the Lithuanians. 

"At first," says Macaulay once more, "the 
chances seemed to be decidedly in favour of 
Protestantism; but the victory remained with 
the Church of Rome. On every point she was 
successful," that is, in the debatable land be- 
tween the south and north of Europe. He 
concludes: "If we overleap another half cen- 
tury (from 1557) we find her victorious and 
dominant in France, Belgium, Bavaria, Bohe- 



THE ROOTS OF ANARCHY 17 



mia, Austria, Poland, and Hungary. Nor has 
Protestantism, in the course of two hundred 
years, been able to reconquer any portion of 
what was then lost." The essayist wrote in 
the year 1840. His last observation holds 
good to-day. 

To strike a balance of gains and losses be- 
tween contending Christians is a melancholy 
task. The thing which at Miinster and Osna- 
bruck stereotyped itself in the world's history 
was a world's catastrophe — the break-up of 
Christendom. It told, to an infinite extent, of 
evil above and below the dividing line, though 
in ways not similar. The gain resulting inside 
these communions by emulation or enforced 
strictness, put it as high as you please, requires 
to be weighed against estrangement and the 
scandal of controversies, unbeliefs, scepticisms, 
and widespread "indifference in religion" 
growing ever among modern nations. To 
Rome the consequences have been incalcu- 
lable. "The multitude of nations which are 
within the fold of the Church," so Newman 
wrote in his Apologia, "will be found to have 
acted for its protection." And he goes on to 
remark, "It seems to me that Catholicity is 
not only one of the notes of the Church, but 
according to the divine purpose one of its 



18 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

securities. I think it would be a very serious 
evil (which divine mercy avert!) that the 
Church should be contracted in Europe within 
the range of particular nationalities. . . . And 
assuredly I think that the loss of the English, 
not to say the German element in its compo- 
sition, has been a most serious misfortune." 
That misfortune became at Westphalia the 
necessary preamble to all treaties, laws, con- 
stitutions, confederacies in every part of the 
globe where Europeans were called upon to 
act. We live under the deep shadow of it 
now. 

For consider the loss to humanity, to 
fraternity. When I celebrate the chief Chris- 
tian rite, which is that of friendship, "common- 
ly called the Mass," according as it is noted in 
the first Prayer Book of King Edward VI, I 
can solemnize it in Notre Dame at Paris, in 
St. Ambrose's at Milan, over the body of St. 
Mark at Venice, in the Annunziata which is 
at Florence, or at the very Confession of St. 
Peter in Rome, where indeed I celebrated my 
first Mass forty-four years ago. And I recall 
with very tender exultation how often I said 
Mass and gave Communion to a kneeling 
crowd in the most heavenly of all God's 
temples, the beloved St. Mark's at Venice. 



THE ROOTS OF ANARCHY 19 

But, although meaning nought but good to 
my fellow-men, I cannot say it in St. Paul's, 
London, or in Westminster Abbey, at St. 
Edward's shrine, or in St. Giles's, Edinburgh, 
or in Christ Church, Dublin. That is a grief 
to me, a rending of the heart. Not because 
of the glory still haunting those hallowed spots 
(yet who would forbid tears even on that 
account?) but by reason of its making me 
strange to men — 

''Men my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping some- 
thing new; 

That which they have done the earnest of the things 
which they shall do." 

And I mourn that the breaking up of home 
should have made two camps — I had almost 
written two prisons. I know them both well. 
Brought up, though a Catholic, among Pro- 
testants of the most austere Puritan type, I 
speak of that which I have seen, not by hear- 
say. Our Shakespeare must have felt some- 
thing of this pity at heart when he drew an 
autumn similitude from the forsaken cloisters — 

"Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." 

And our manly, pious old Samuel Johnson; 
there was more than sentiment or romantic 
moonlight poetry in his indignation at the 



20 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

havoc wrought upon those beautiful and quiet 
places where the converted Barbarian had dis- 
covered how he might live in peace. The con- 
tinuity of European development had been 
unbroken before the days of Luther ; yes, even 
though the Western Empire fell; for the 
Church carried it on, and created the institu- 
tions as well as inspired the art and the best 
legislation of the Middle Ages. But now the 
Law of Compensation, whereby each part of 
our civilised world contributes to the progress 
of the whole, found itself thwarted and made 
of none effect; since forces that should have 
worked together in harmony were henceforth 
working to their reciprocal destruction. The 
South decayed because the North revolted. 

Could any wise man's son or sincere Chris- 
tian deem this a consummation devoutly to be 
wished? Was it unavoidable? Then let us 
acknowledge and lament it in sackcloth and 
ashes. The thing which had come to pass im- 
mediately was the setting up of Nations as 
Churches, with denial of the International 
Church. This broke the strength of Christen- 
dom precisely when, by the discovery and 
conquest of America, its power might have 
been doubled. It left Rome in a state of 
exhaustion, Germany wasted to a wilderness, 



THE ROOTS OF ANARCHY 21 

Spain in decline, Britain curiously isolated then 
and ever after from the Continent. One clear 
consequence we read, which came strangely 
enough in the wake of a system said to be es- 
tablished on Private Judgment, or as we now 
term it Free Thought. Monarchies limited 
during the Middle Ages by open compacts with 
their people, by the feudal network of sworn 
engagements between the king and his vassals, 
but above all by the dedication of princi- 
palities and powers to the Lord Christ, 
whose Vicar was their acting suzerain, threw 
off these restraints and declared themselves 
absolute. 

For centuries the Holy See had resisted the 
German Emperors, Franconian, Hohenstauf- 
fen, who were bent on making their will the 
law of Church and State. The clergy of the 
West claimed immunities, taxed themselves 
in their own synods, and in no slight degree 
fulfilled the duties we now assign to a consti- 
tutional Opposition. But just before Luther 
was born a constellation of unlucky stars 
frowning on this medieval balance of power 
brought in, along with the Renaissance, what 
has been rightly called "the Age of the Des- 
pots." Nothing could be so false to history 
as the language popular in journalism which 



22 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

condemns any tyrant's act of violence or op- 
pression as "medieval." The full-blown tyrant, 
whether Louis XI of France, our own Henry 
Tudor, the Fleming Charles V, his son Philip 
II, or the French Bourbon who caps them all, 
Louis XIV, was produced by the Renaissance, 
whose beginnings we trace far back, even to 
the republication of the Imperial Roman Law 
in the early twelfth century. 

Well, I have to insist that the "solely sove- 
reign sway and masterdom" fatal to liberty, 
exercised by these men, are abhorrent to the 
genius, the tradition, and the true interests of 
the Catholic Church. All who glance into her 
chronicles know that there was such a man as 
Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII. They have, 
at least in its main lines, followed the quarrel, 
hardly ever pausing, between the Sacerdotium 
and the Imperium, or spiritual independence 
and secular force. Whr.tever judgment may 
be passed on the acts of popes, councils, or 
saints in that combat, the fact remains that 
their strivings went to the limitation of royal 
prerogatives. It can never be otherwise in 
principle. For kingdoms are of this world, 
and the Catholic Church holds of the world 
to come. A king may be "Defender of the 
Faith" by papal diploma; to make him 



THE ROOTS OF ANARCHY 23 

"Definer of the Faith" is to fall into heresy. 
No pope would subscribe to the Lutheran 
Westphalian doctrine, "Cujus regio, ejus 
religio/' The tyrant must halt on the thresh- 
old of the Holy Place, otherwise the doom of 
Uzziah will strike him, and as a leper and 
usurper he will be driven forth. On such 
an issue battle is joined between Rome and 
Prussia. 

If we widen the compass of the word 
"Faith," so as to take in whatsoever belongs 
chiefly or altogether to man's inward faculties ; 
for example, his conscience, mental systems, 
fine arts and the like, which have among them 
a most intimate relation; we shall be obliged 
to grant that, in refusing to subject the Church 
to an absolute secular lord, the clergy were 
protecting civilisation. They were finding a 
way of escape from tyranny, yet holding up 
ideals opposed to anarchy. The Treaty of 
Westphalia by its inclusion of the spiritual 
domain within the king's pale was promoting 
the one and the other. Both tyranny and 
anarchy indeed were already grappling, as the 
story of England shows. To that story, with 
its controlling event, the judicial execution of 
Charles I, let us now turn. If on October 24, 
1648, we might have calculated the horoscope 



24 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

of a future German Empire, Prussian, abso- 
lute, exalting itself above all that is called 
God or worshipped; on January 30, 1649, we 
might have beheld the vindication on a public 
scaffold of the medieval doctrine that a ruler 
must answer before man, as well as at the 
divine judgment-seat, for his unconstitutional 
acts. This was the second and, as I believe, 
the more momentous of those two historical 
scenes which distinguish the great Hundred 
Days of the seventeenth century. 






CHAPTER II 



How England solved her Kaiser-problem 

WITH music and passion the late A. C. 
Swinburne warned all sovereign per- 
sons in his Songs Before Sunrise, to the effect 
that — 

"Night hath its one red star, Tyrannicide." 

A fine verse, reminiscent of another in Schil- 
ler's Wallenstein, and it stays in the memory. 
Like a death-knell it keeps ringing through cer- 
tain historical episodes, and through the cen- 
turies, down to the murder of a Royal and Im- 
perial Archduke, the Austrian Franz Ferdi- 
nand, with his wife, on that June 28, 1914, 
when, as on a mighty stage, beheld of the whole 
world, there was raised the curtain of war. I 
pause to reflect, not I hope fancifully, on the 
constant succession of symbolic acts, as though 
we were witnessing an Apocalypse, which 
has accompanied or foreshadowed the present 
course of events. From Charles I of England 
to Charles I of Austria may well figure in 
histories by and by as a great cycle complete. 

25 



26 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

If a title be wanted, let us call it "The King's 
Evil." For it is a tragedy of a divine pre- 
tension claimed, found out, and finally re- 
jected. The Greek name, when we use cold 
scientific terms, is "Autocracy." But warm- 
hearted indignant men and women denounce 
it as "Tyranny." 

Whether it be lawful to kill a tyrant; and, 
if lawful, how it may be sinlessly done, by 
shooting, stabbing, poisoning, secretly or 
openly — these are questions for debating so- 
cieties. In their time they occupied and divided 
theologians. Perhaps I may say that there 
are two questions: "Can a king commit trea- 
son against his people?" and "If he can, what 
is to be done with him?" The human race, 
on the whole, is for good and sound reasons 
instinctively loyal to such a degree that it 
will suffer almost any extremity of oppression 
before taking in hand to overturn au- 
thority. That is the Law of the Tribe. But 
there shines above it on heavenly heights the 
Law of Justice, with which is no respect of 
persons, and woe to that person who strikes 
against it! 

From another point of view and custom of 
language "persons" are the very subjects which 
this Law contemplates ; for it draws an infinite 



ENGLAND'S KAISER-PROBLEM 27 

distinction between "persons" and "things." 
Every right of man over man is a personal re- 
lation as between men; and tyranny may be 
described as the degradation of the subject, 
who is as much a person as any ruler, to the 
status of a mere "thing," a piece of property, 
a passive instrument, used simply as a means 
to some end outside himself. To use a whole 
society called a Nation after this fashion is be- 
yond possible doubt a crime against Justice, 
and a very high crime. That kings may be 
guilty of it the "chronicles of wasted time" do 
all too clearly, and in every succeeding genera- 
tion prove. And tyrannicide has answered 
it with, "Killing no murder." As Milton 
writes: "No nation under heaven but in one 
age or other hath done the like." Then, re- 
ferring to England, he proudly adds — and let 
us admire his unparalleled majesty of speech 
— "The difference only is, which rather seems 
to us matter of glory, that they for the most 
part have without form of law done the deed 
by a kind of martial justice, we by the deliber- 
ate and well-weighted sentence of a legal 
judicature." 

Yes, John Milton, so did the Court pro- 
nounce; and yet "by the power of the sword 
and a law not to be found in any of the 



28 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

books." Charles Stuart was not a Doge, like 
Marino Faliero, whose vacant place in the 
Hall of the Great Council at Venice leaves 
on the traveller a more distinct impression 
than all the portraits of all the Doges painted 
there. Could an anointed hereditary sovereign 
be a traitor? He denied it, England asserted 
it, and Whitehall closed the debate and the 
scene. I find a strange but true resemblance 
as I turn over the pages of Milton, Clarendon, 
and Carlyle, between the actors, the causes, 
the conclusions, of that era named from the 
"Great Rebellion" and our own. The Kaiser 
is Charles I; the Germans are the Cavaliers; 
we are the Independents; and, as I trust, our 
armies will be the Ironsides. But in essence 
and issue the problem has grown from British 
to European, to American. That I am not 
inventing an imaginary likeness where none 
exists, I will now endeavour to show. 

Charles I was not a man of conspicuous 
ability or in any way abnormal. Each of 
the leading Englishmen who took his part, or 
who acted and fought on the other side, was 
in some degree remarkable, as Laud, Straf- 
ford, Hyde, and again Hampden, Falk- 
land, Pym — Milton and Cromwell being out 
of all comparison with any in their time. 



ENGLAND'S KAISER-PROBLEM 29 

The romance of the Stuarts has cast a glamour 
about Charles the Martyr; had he not been 
martyred, what would his dearest partisan^ 
have cared for his remembrance? On the 
other hand, Kaiser Wilhelm, though no true 
genius, illustrates the view put forward by 
Lombroso that insanity bears a kinship to 
genius; for the Kaiser is abnormal, explosive 
in word and deed, as unresting as a maniac, 
and conceited of himself as artist, tactician, 
preacher, sportsman, and universal dilettante. 
He, too, comes of the Stuarts; but in his 
longing to be held a virtuoso he reproduces 
Frederick the Great, and would lay himself 
open to sarcasm as piercing from Voltaire. 
Yet, on this difference between the men I 
am going to set up an argument, viz. that the 
evil done by the one and doing by the other 
cannot be deemed a personal characteristic. 
It was due in Charles, and it is evidently trace- 
able in the Kaiser, to the system which both in- 
herited ; it is the King's Evil. 

In Charles it appeared as a dull obstinacy to 
be conquered by no changes of fortune. An- 
drew Marvell praises him "upon that memor- 
able scene," where he laid down his life. I will 
praise him too for such dignity and courage, 
worthy of his ancestress at Fotheringhay. 



30 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

But he was doing homage to a false ideal ; and 
he died the enemy of man. In like manner the 
German Emperor, who would carry over the 
world that same false doctrine of the Absolute 
King, may in this be a sample of fortitude 
that the horrors of his own enactment which 
he has witnessed in Belgium, France and 
Poland, have not killed him outright. 
He sees them and sees them not. Why? 
because of his theory, which is an obsession, 
that he, William of Hohenzollern, is the 
purpose, end, and divine meaning of all those 
myriad creatures sacrificed to his designs. 
We must get close to the heart of this, and 
we can do it most directly in Milton's prose 
works. 

I know, of course, what Matthew Arnold 
has written, scornfully yet not without warrant, 
of Milton's vituperation in arguing with his 
opponents. If Salmasius scolds like a fish- 
wife, the poet who delights our soul in Comus 
retorts with a licence and a ribald humour 
such as we can but endure in Aristophanes. 
It is a pity, and it is true. Their learning in 
the classics led equally astray the French 
pedant, who knew no better, and the poet 
engarlanded who should not have trailed his 
singing robes in this mire. The point I am 



ENGLAND'S KAISER-PROBLEM 31 

enforcing lies free of sophistry and ribaldry 
alike. It is as patent in Salmasius defending 
Charles as in Milton's attack upon him. No 
veil of impenetrable darkness hangs over the 
life and the deeds of Mary Stuart's grandson, 
like the cloud which hides that inner tragedy 
of the Casket Letters. Here the facts are not 
in dispute. What Charles did and why he did 
it were patent to the world even before he 
came to his untimely end. With Mary Queen 
of Scots the problem is largely a matter of 
evidence; with Charles it turns almost exclu- 
sively on principle. 

And so Mary appeals to lovers of romance 
and the insoluble; but when we are discussing 
her grandson it is the "instans tyrannus," or 
the Absolute King whom he embodies, that 
fixes our attention. Milton's successive works, 
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) , 
his Observations on Ormond's Articles of Peace 
(the same year), his unsparing Eikonoclastes, 
or The Image-Breaker (also 1649), in answer 
to Eikon Basilike, or Portraiture of his Sacred 
Majestyinhis Solitudes and Sufferings, all give 
us, in prose not less grave and massy than the 
didactic portions of his poems, the lineaments 
under which he saw an English monarch who 
would play the Oriental despot and make of 



32 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

every law a personal decree to be altered, re- 
voked, or disregarded at his good pleasure. 

Milton showed no mercy; some accusations 
he brought which were monstrously untrue; 
but his main contention was just and demons- 
trable, as he proved, out of Charles's own 
mouth. How, indeed, we must inquire, should 
it not be so, when the king's creed about king- 
ship was what we know it to have been? All 
that the hired advocate of Leyden, Claude Sau- 
maise, desired to achieve was merely to call 
these acts of royalty by another name, defend- 
ing them by the prerogative which, in his philo- 
sophy born of the Renaissance, made the Su- 
preme Ruler irresponsible. And all that 
Milton accomplished, in his two great Defen- 
sions of the English People, was to convert 
into a Latin fit for gods the indictment already 
framed by him in his mother-tongue. 

While setting up these imperishable monu- 
ments of genius and freedom, he did likewise 
deliver sentence on every after-attempt to en- 
slave Europe under the pretence of the divine 
right of autocracy. He speaks to us now with 
a sanction derived from the victories of English 
political wisdom, which in two hundred years 
has made the round of the globe. Nothing 
less than a crucial experiment was in question. 



ENGLAND'S KAISER-PROBLEM 33 

The English idea of constitutional law and 
ordered liberty we know by experience, and all 
nations are learning it, is as commanding in 
political science as is the principle of gravita- 
tion formulated by Newton in physics. If 
Newton showed how the whole universe is 
balanced, our creative thinkers, acting on a 
national character whose instinct for justice 
they rendered into practice, have discovered 
the scales of reason in which authority and 
obedience are equally poised. Their discovery 
is, in Tennyson's words, 

"Our crowned Republic's crowning common sense." 

The image of a king that Milton broke was, 
in truth, an idol. Long worshipped, ever since 
Pharaoh the monarch offered sacrifice to him- 
self as Pharaoh the god, Ammon-Ra, this 
illusion confounded the man with his office; 
and while "dressed in a little brief authority," 
it flung round him the divine attributes. 
Charles I could not be brought to un- 
derstand that as king he was the creation of 
law, and that the law of the community over 
which he ruled. If he has even the shadow 
of Divine Right it falls first on the collective 
people. This to generations nurtured on 
sound political thought is a commonplace; 



34 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

to the old Cavalier and the modern Junker it 
is blasphemy. But reason and fact are there 
to show that society made the king and not 
the king society. Or, putting the same truth 
in modern terms, the nation creates its own 
organs. It creates each of them for its own 
purpose, and when they fail to do their duty or 
do the very opposite, the body politic suffers, 
and they must be reformed or removed. 

Subjects, then, are neither the king's children 
nor his chattels ; a State is something different 
in origin and intention from a family, as Aris- 
totle pointed out long ago when he wrote the 
first page of his Politics, and as Milton quoted 
from him in reply to Salmasius: "For that 
there is not a numerical but a specifical differ- 
ence betwixt a kingdom and a family." Milton 
continues, "For at first men entered into so- 
cieties, not that any one might insult over all 
the rest, but that in case any should injure 
another, there might be laws and judges to 
protect them from wrong, or at least to punish 
the wrongdoers." And Aristotle sums the 
matter grandly: "He that first founded civil 
society was the cause of the greatest good ; for 
as by the completion of it man is the most 
excellent of living beings, so without law and 
justice he would be the worst of all. For 



ENGLAND'S KAISER-PROBLEM 35 

nothing is so difficult to subdue as injustice in 
arms; but these arms man is born with, viz. 
prudence and valour, which he may apply to 
the most opposite purposes ; for he that abuses 
them will be the most wicked, the most cruel, 
the most lustful, and most gluttonous being 
imaginable. Justice is, then, a political virtue, 
by the rules of which the State is regu- 
lated, and these rules are the criterion of what 
is right." 

Now a king like Charles I or his later kins- 
man and imitator, the Kaiser, holds himself 
to be not, indeed, a beast but a god ; in his own 
eyes he is hors la lot, as above it and beyond 
its reach. When he declares, as Wilhelm did, 
that "the king's will is the highest law," and 
again, "There is no law but my law" ; or asserts 
that he is answerable only to God, meaning in 
another world, at the Day of Judgment, and 
certainly not to men, to what can this amount 
except doing away with all penalties annexed 
to tyranny? 

In such case the "divinity that doth hedge 
a king" makes of him in the full force of the 
words a chartered libertine. He, the supreme 
law-giver, is not bound by law. His oath is not 
taken to the people; therefore Charles argued 
that he might construe it as he listed. The 



36 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

promise that he makes is not a pledge. In 
every negotiation he reserves the royal right 
of breaking any clause or all together, if he 
thinks any part derogatory to his crown. Of 
the fact he, sole and singular, is the judge in 
his own breast, and this he terms the king's 
conscience. In short, between him and his 
people there is no reciprocity. 

Since I began writing this chapter an august 
chief of a very great nation has translated the 
view here drawn out into more general terms. 
"A stedfast concert for Peace," said the Presi- 
dent of the United States on April 2, 1917, 
advising Congress to declare a state of war with 
Germany, "can never be maintained except by 
the partnership of democratic nations." And 
why so? He gives the reason: "No auto- 
cratic Government could be trusted to keep 
faith within it or observe its covenants." We 
have at length, in these few sentences, plucked 
out the heart of arbitrary power and laid it 
bare before the sun. This was the innermost 
spring of Charles's dealings with friend and 
foe. This to-day is Kaiserism, a crowned and 
sceptred Unfaith. It cries by the lips of an 
earlier tyrant in Shakespeare, John Lackland-— 

"What earthly name to interrogatories 
Can task the free breath of a sacred king ?" 



ENGLAND'S KAISER-PROBLEM 37 

Beyond the simple abuse of power by vio- 
lence, which might spring from various bad 
motives, but need be no more than a passing 
plague, lies the fundamental error of a system 
in which the king — and it could only be a king 
— remains for ever by inherent claim outside 
and above the society he governs. This royal 
isolation, "without the assistance of a mortal 
hand" to restrain while supporting the rod of 
empire, is what I have pointed to as the "King's 
Evil." It breaks the divinely ordained bonds 
which hold men together — the pledged word, 
the recognised human dignity, and the sense 
of honour that should follow on these things. 
It frustrates the very end for which authority 
exists. 

Of the Kaiser's delinquencies there will be 
enough said by and by. Looking back to his 
Stuart precursor in this bad way, I remark 
that Whig historians have dwelt with justice 
on the "instances of ill-faith," as Hallam 
gently observes, "accumulated as they are 
through the life of Charles," which "render 
the assertion of his sincerity a proof either of 
historical ignorance, or of a want of moral 
delicacy." And in his Essay on Milton we 
find Macaulay saying, "The nation had to deal 
with a man who made and broke promises 



38 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 



with equal facility, a man whose honour had 
been a hundred times pawned, and never re- 
deemed." Ludlow the regicide lays this down 
as one of his chief reasons for consenting to 
Charles's death — Ludlow, one of "the bad re- 
volting stars" which could endure him no 
longer as the sun of the English firmament. 
"I was fully persuaded," he writes, "that an 
accommodation with the king was unsafe to 
the people of England, and unjust and wicked 
in the nature of it. The former, besides that 
it was obvious to all men, the king himself had 
proved by the duplicity of his dealing with the 
Parliament, which manifestly appeared in his 
own papers, taken at the battle of Naseby and 
elsewhere." But the Glamorgan papers 
proved that Charles could be guilty of false- 
hood double and treble, to Irish Catholics and 
of course to his own servants; as his earlier 
unfaith led Strafford vehemently to exclaim, 
"Put not your trust in princes." 

Now let us keep always in mind that this 
unhappy man's dissimulation and downright 
lying were the fruits of a perverted con- 
science; by no means were they sins of frailty 
committed by a weak mortal driven to bay. 
His theory justified, and his mode of action 
thence resulting demanded them. To talk, as 



ENGLAND'S KAISER-PROBLEM 39 

Hallam does, of "insincerity" is superficial. 
According to the doctrine of absolute power 
laid down, for example, by James I, and ac- 
cepted, so far as words went, by some of the 
lawyers and a multitude of the divines who 
helped the Stuarts to their ruin as a dynasty, 
the king owed nothing of strict obligation 
to his people which they could claim or vindi- 
cate in any effectual way. Truth and jus- 
tice he owed to God, not to them. "Shall 
we make enquiries," said Heath, attorney- 
general, in arguing on behalf of the 
Crown, "whether his commands are lawful? — 
Who shall call in question the justice of the 
king's actions, who is not to give account 
for them?" Such was the Royal Charter 
which brought its victim in front of the 
banqueting room at Whitehall, and left him 
there under the axe of the man in a mask, 
well representing the anonymous People who 
judged him. 

But England's answer to this whole conten- 
tion had been given by a great lawyer in the 
Latin axiom which to all intents we still main- 
tain, "Nolumus leges Angliae mutare," "We 
will not have our English Constitution 
destroyed." Before the Stuarts, before the 
Hohenzollerns, there was the Common Law, 



40 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

protected as time went on by "the ancient, 
constant, and undoubted right and usage of 
Parliaments to question and complain of all 
persons, of what degree soever, found grievous 
to the commonwealth, in abusing the power 
and trust committed to them by their sove- 
reign." This, in effect, amounted to the 
responsibility of the king's ministers, and since 
he could not act without agents it took away 
from his person what it added to his immunity. 
Not the man Charles Stuart, but Charles King 
of England in his courts, beginning with the 
High Court of Parliament, had jurisdiction 
over the people of England. The Common 
Law was the fount of freedom. 

The nation, thus constituted, was superior 
to all its parts, not excluding the king. He 
had no such thing as absolute power; it was 
unknown to law and incompatible with it. 
"His Majesty's immediate act and will," being 
a mere personal command, had no force in 
itself to compel or coerce the subject in his 
property or his person; all must be done 
according to law, and with a remedy in the 
courts for any wrong suffered by illegal pro- 
cedure. Otherwise, "every statute from the 
time of Magna Charta, designed to protect the 
personal [and the real] liberties of English- 



ENGLAND'S KAISER-PROBLEM 41 

men, became a dead letter." The new Magna 
Charta (1628), which was called the "Petition 
of Right," and to which, after attempts at 
evasion, Charles most unwillingly assented, 
links modern England with medieval, while it 
traces the line upon whose mounting curve the 
world's political progress henceforth was to be 
followed. 

From all that is here briefly set down it will 
appear that, while the execution of Charles 
might be described in Carlylean language as 
a "doom's blast" of autocracy, and a notice to 
quit served on absolute sovereigns then and 
ever since, the solution of the problem raised 
by him lay elsewhere than on the scaffold. 
Regicide is no remedy. Still indulging in quo- 
tation, we might say, and it is the truth of 
history, "Uno avulso, non deficit alter." "The 
royal oak is not so easily cut down." And 
by wisdom, as was proved in this fortunate 
realm, we may preserve the golden bough. 
The most illustrious tyrannicide that ever 
stained human chronicles, that "lofty scene, 
to be acted over in states unborn and accents 
yet unknown," when, according to Cicero, there 
was no honest Roman but dipped his hands in 
Csesar's blood, what good thing did it bring 
forth? It gave Rome an Augustus for a 



42 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

Julius, no gold instead of bronze, but a con- 
summate actor instead of "the foremost man 
of all this world." We will not canonise our 
tyrant-killers. Let us show mankind a more 
excellent way. Milton, whose indictment of 
Charles cannot, in its leading points, be gain- 
said, was under the necessity of taking service 
with Cromwell, a king de facto stern as death ; 
and Cromwell, I think honestly, wanted to be 
king by law that the ancient Constitution of 
the land might not perish. 

Just upon forty years after Charles had 
expiated his evil deeds, a son of his, not one 
atom less blind and obstinate than his father, 
provoked the nation by lawless attacks on the 
persons and property of the men of England. 
But this time the axe did not fall. A legal 
fiction saved the people from any repetition 
of so useless an expedient. James was held 
to have abdicated, and the "Declaration of 
Right" completed that true restoration of 
English liberties which the "Petition of 
Right" had called for but could only prophesy. 
The old immemorial relation of king and people 
was renewed. Their compact, binding on both 
sides, took its full effect. Monarchy was 
limited, not abolished. Ministers acted by the 
royal authority, but were responsible to the 



ENGLAND'S KAISER-PROBLEM 48 

nation in Parliament assembled. The power 
of the purse remained with the Commons. And 
by the striking device of the annual Mutiny 
Bill the power of the sword, for control of 
which the Great Rebellion had come about, 
was left in the King's hands, yet on con- 
dition of his using it wisely in deference to 
the Parliament's decisions touching peace and 
war. 

Every one of these provisions, we see now 
and experience proves, was a master-stroke of 
genius. No wonder that the British Constitu- 
tion became, during the eighteenth century, 
"the envy and admiration of surrounding 
nations!" Who will not confess that in a 
matter of highest moment, where the Renais- 
sance went utterly wrong, these Pyms and 
Seldens and Maynards and Halifaxes and 
Somerses — let me be just and add the name 
of John Locke, their philosopher in this 
province — had seen the true idea of a self- 
governed, self-balanced community, free at 
last from false mystical delusions which them- 
selves led to anarchy by making tyranny 
inevitable and eternal? It was the axe of 
absolute power, not the glaive of freedom, 
that slew Charles Stuart. He perished by his 
own weapon, for in the last analysis the tyrant 



44 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

relies on brute force as the rebel does who 
strikes in a frenzy against him. 

England had her Kaiser problem three cen- 
turies ago, which it took her a hundred years 
to solve — reckoning from James I to George 
I — and most triumphantly did she meet and 
solve it. There was a second problem, not less 
important to the welfare of mankind — that 
of administering justice justly, — and thanks 
to her trial by jury, her system of evidence, 
and the independence of her judges, she has 
solved that also. These are among her proud- 
est titles to the gratitude of all succeeding 
ages. They constitute her the champion of 
the rights of man, which are God-given and 
can never be repealed. They justify, while 
they explain, the magnificent fact that in this 
war she is leading the nations to victory. 



CHAPTER III 



Prussia's Rise and Claim to "Kultur" 

1 CANNOT begin what I have now to 
throw on paper without first paying a 
tribute of affection and regret to the 
memory of my dear old German master, Karl 
Kemen, who died last year at Boppard on 
the Rhine. My heart is heavy when I think 
of him and of our last excursion together in 
the company of his devoted wife. It was on 
a Sunday in summer — a German Sunday — 
bright and peaceful; and we went by the 
river to Konigsstein, to see the castle there. 
"O Deutschland, hoch in Ehre!" sings the 
minstrel; and how gladly would I take up 
the refrain! My venerated professor spoke 
and wrote his three languages — German, 
French, English — idiomatically perfect. He 
was by far the best master I ever had. He 
rather discouraged my eagerness to plunge 
into Kant and Hegel. But he would promise 
me, as a reward for undertaking Schiller, that 
I should enjoy the Nibelungen Lied — which 

45 



46 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

I have since done, though I prefer the Ice- 
landic original, the Volsungs' Lay — and it 
pleased him greatly when I ranged about in 
the dialects of the Fatherland. He was a 
fervent Catholic of Austrian sympathies, and 
an intimate personal friend of the late Arch- 
duke Stephen, who wrote to him constantly. 
He saw a good deal at Frankfort, in early 
years, of Count Bismarck, whom, not to put 
a fine point on it, he detested. Were all, or 
most, of his nation like the Rhinelander Karl 
Kemen, I should not now be writing this book. 
God rest my dear friend's soul! 

I required no spur to adventure myself in 
German literature, German mythology; but 
perhaps it may be worth while to record that 
I drew none of my enthusiasm from Carlyle, 
whom I did not study or take to until I had 
gone through thousands of pages in the authors 
that inspired him. The Germany thus made 
known to me I shall love and cherish until my 
dying day. It is an immense possession. 

"Mein Vermachtniss, wie herrlich weit und breit!" 

It is a land of hills and rivers and fine old 
cities. I may not hope ever to set eyes again 
upon the pleasant streams and bluffs of Rhine 
and Moselle, or the Main and the Neckar 



PRUSSIA'S RISE TO "KULTUR" 47 

and the Inn, with so many flourishing dales 
between. But I carry with me in remem- 
brance, sometimes I dream about, Cologne and 
Strasburg, Heidelberg and Niirnberg, often 
under a high-sailing moon. And who that has 
looked ever at Rolandseck and the Seven 
Mountains from the west at eventide but must 
feel melancholy when he thinks that he shall 
never spend such an hour again? This new 
"Hermannschlacht" has buried on the battle- 
field my legend-haunted Germany of music, 
romance, meditation, travel. Bismarck's leg- 
acy of statecraft, blood and iron, has made an 
end of all that. 

Well, therefore, do I know the memories 
that should furnish forth a Trauerrede, or 
funeral oration, over the corpse of the Ger- 
many which is no more, and which at first was 
haunted, then murdered, by an evil demon 
fulfilling perfectly Aristotle's account of "in- 
justice in arms," and of the power which abuses 
prudence and valour, as "the most wicked, 
the most cruel, the most lustful, and most 
gluttonous being imaginable." How accurate 
a description of modern Prussia these words 
yield is clear from the evidence, day by day 
steadily growing, of what went before the war 
and what has happened since. Nothing 



48 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 



like it, so far as my reading extends, can be 
quoted from history, though Assyrians, Huns, 
and Mongols might have made to the Prus- 
sian war-system a gift of certain devilish 
ingredients for its cauldron. The final mix- 
ture, the quintessence forced upon a shud- 
dering world, is, however, as unexampled as 
envenomed. 

When we say that civilisation is at stake we 
utter less than the truth. For something still 
more near to our hearts than the outward frame 
and order of society is in peril. Prussia, with 
malice aforethought, has made war on Hu- 
manity. Let not any one suppose that I, a 
man advanced in years, a priest and a student 
living far away from centres of political strife, 
desire to indulge in the language of Thersites. 
Had the story, tested and proved, of the Ger- 
man occupation of Belgium and France 
been other than it is, would not my judgment 
have also been different? We know in this 
country, and we bear witness among ourselves, 
that this nation at large did not imagine such 
portents of deliberate cruelty to be possible 
in the forward march of European armies, until 
they came to pass. They bewilder our thought 
as much as they appal our feeling. They 
put a new face upon war between Western 



PRUSSIA'S RISE TO "KULTUR" 49 

peoples. But I am thus led to inquire in 
what sense the Prussians can be considered 
Western. 

Historically, they never formed part of the 
Roman Empire. As we saw in my first chap- 
ter, the permanent division made in 364 by 
Valentinian between West and East bound up 
Illyricum, Italy, the Gauls, Spain, and Britain 
into a single confederacy, with its Latin type 
of culture and its one religion, of which the 
capital was Rome. I call this the Western 
world. And to it the Prussians did not belong 
at any time. Their significance for us lies in 
the opposition which now, after ages of dis- 
sent from its ideals, has burst out from them 
in a war for its destruction. 

I stand here at the height of my view, 
gazing down on Roman and Teuton — 
but a Prussianised Teuton — locked in deadly 
combat. 

Heine, that arrogant young Jew of genius, 
after once calling upon the British governor 
of Heligoland — we had not yet made a present 
of it to our enemy — drew from that single 
specimen a formula, and defined John Bull 
as the "man-machine." There was never 
perhaps a stroke of satire that more widely 
missed its mark. Consider a moment what 



50 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

we understand by a machine. It has neither 
soul nor ideas nor feeling; all its parts are 
made by a power not itself; it moves only as 
it is driven; it obeys thought put into its 
working but has none of its own; and when 
it is hurt it cannot repair the damage, or 
only by another piece of equally mindless 
machinery. Heine saw that English inventors 
were constantly making machines; therefore, 
he argued, they must be machines themselves. 
The eighteenth century, which grew acquainted 
with the modern Englishman as never before, 
and which laid stress on the "argument from 
design," knew better. It recognised in him 
an originality of thought, a resolution in going 
his own way, and a self-control under cir- 
cumstances where others would be lost, such 
as to set him in a class the very contrary of 
the mechanical, and, as we now say, the stand- 
ardised. Attentive readers will have already 
grasped the reason why this blunder of Heine's 
must be flung into the dust-heap of exploded 
fallacies. I am going to retort on him, and 
I shall not blunder, they may take my word 
for it. 

This lively Jew ought to have looked nearer 
home, if he was searching for Lamettrie's 
"L'Homme-Machine." There is a mixed 



PRUSSIA'S RISE TO "KULTUR" 51 

race, dwelling along the shores of the Baltic 
Sea, in Prussia West and East, in Pomerania, 
in Brandenburg, which entirely fits the defi- 
nition. "Five hundred miles and more to 
the east of Brandenburg," says Carlyle, in his 
characteristic way, "lies a Country then [about 
997] as now called Preussen (Prussia Proper) , 
inhabited by Heathens, where also endeavours 
at conversion [to Christianity] are going on, 
though without success hitherto." I entirely 
agree; the description is felicitous. He con- 
tinues: "In Henry the Fowler's time, and 
long afterwards, Preussen was a vehemently 
Heathen country; the natives a miscellany of 
rough Serbic Wends, Letts, Swedish Goths, 
or Dryasdust knows not what. . . . Dryas- 
dust knows only that these Preussen were 
a strong-boned, iracund herdsman and fisher 
people ; highly averse to being interfered with, 
especially in their religion." Quite so, and 
they have not altered. But a people more 
unlike the Germans who had been schooled by 
the Roman Empire and the Roman Church 
you would not easily find. The Rhine- 
dwellers, Suabians, Franconians, even the 
Saxons along the Elbe, afford another type and 
a less forbidding nature to our observation. 
An English lady residing not many years 



52 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

ago in Pomerania was told that the tribes 
which emigrated to Britain had once lived 
there. She answered that, if it were true, 
they must have taken away "all the smiles" 
when they went, for she had not seen one 
on the face of any of the natives left behind. 
The fatal defect, a lack of humour, is emi- 
nently Prussian, and it implies a sameness in 
individuals very favourable to despotic rule. 
The Prussian Spartans, like their archetypes 
in the Greek world, are of a sullen temper, 
slow to construe a different mind, as well 
as implacable when offended. Since the give- 
and-take of an urbane converse lies beyond 
them, it irritates their pride ; and they become 
violent on the misunderstanding into which 
they are constantly falling. Hence they make 
bad masters. The colonial policy of the Em- 
pire is admittedly a failure everywhere. It is 
neither just nor gentle, therefore it cannot 
succeed. Often during the war Prussian 
newspapers have asked wonderingly, "Why 
have we no friends in the wide world?" 
Here we may perceive the reason. 

These miscellaneous Wends, Swedish Goths, 
and other East Europeans spread themselves 
into Brandenburg, and, getting still more 
mixed, they appear in history as "men of 



PRUSSIA'S RISE TO "KULTUR" 53 

the Mark," forming a population which was 
never true German, waiting until Teutonic 
knights and Hohenzollern bailiffs out of 
Suabia should beat them into human- Christian 
shape. It is always to be noted that the 
Hohenzollerns were not themselves, any more 
than they are now, of the Prussian stock. 
This fact is essential to their story and to us. 
The Royal family of Prussia was, and is, 
German. Hence it served as a chemical 
reagent to unite elements very unlike and 
otherwise irreconcilable. That function it 
has performed again and again, so that we 
behold the Catholic peoples of the Rhine 
brought into one huge confederacy with Pro- 
testants of Stettin and Konigsberg, utterly 
different from them in race and religion. 

Now let us dwell for a moment on this highly 
significant duty assigned to the erstwhile 
"Burgraves of Niirnberg in Frankenland." 
Carlyle says that they were "a thrifty, sted- 
fast, diligent, clear-sighted, stout-hearted line 
of men," and "always of a growing, gaming 
nature." Their first office at Niirnberg, granted 
by Frederick Barbarossa towards 1170, in- 
volved, he tells us, "a talent for governing as 
well as for judging; talent for fighting also, 
in cases of extremity, and what is still better, 



54 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

a talent for avoiding to fight." We will take 
this to be a true description of the Hohen- 
zollerns at their best. What follows? 

Surely this, that it was their business under 
Providence to bring to the fierce heathen and 
non-Roman tribes over whom, by fighting or by 
purchase, they in due time acquired lordship the 
blessings of religion and civilisation. Civilisa- 
tion from the Greco-Roman world, which had 
stretched itself long ages back as far as Rhine 
and Danube; and religion from the Hebrew- 
Roman tradition, of which the Papacy was 
the head and front. By the standard, then, 
of a double inheritance, always reckoned 
in this "objective," historical, and Western 
fashion, which is no less real than intelligible, 
we will measure the achievements of the 
House of Niirnberg, advancing itself and 
winning its way by cash down in the years 
1412-17, and at the Council of Constance, 
into the Electorate of Brandenburg, which it 
bought from the Emperor Sigismund. Into 
"the grand tide of European events," the 
line of Hohenzollern enters at this point with 
Frederick the Statthalter. 

It goes back, we saw, to 1170, when Henry 
II of England was acquiring the disastrous 
lordship of Ireland, which has been the one con- 



PRUSSIA'S RISE TO "KULTUR" 55 

spicuous, if not irretrievable, failure of the 
English "talent for governing as well as for 
judging." Its entry on a wider stage is timed 
at the hour of Constance, where nations pa- 
raded as churches, though not yet broken off 
from Catholic unity. It registers all its "grow- 
ing and gaining," so far as the year 1701, by 
forcing its way in among crowned royalties, 
and taking the name of Prussia to cover its 
conquests — this within a dozen years after the 
English "glorious Revolution," which decided 
that Britain should be a royal democracy, not 
a royal absolutism. 

The rest of the story is sketched and 
summed up in Frederick II, "commonly 
called the Great"; and his successors count 
only in the degree by which they have carried 
out his plans, attempting to do with and for 
Europe that which he had done with and for 
Prussia. In detail most of the chronicle is 
deplorably dull, not offering scenes on which 
the picturesque narrator could show skill or 
be pathetic and arresting. Carlyle himself, 
who endured boredom (Langeweile) in re- 
search as if he were a professor at Gottin- 
gen, calls Frederick's history, told by the 
Prussian Dryasdust, "a wise-spread, inor- 
ganic, trackless matter; dismal to your mind, 



56 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

and barren as a continent of Brandenburg 
sand." Imagine what sand of the Sahara 
must the story be of other Hohenzollern 
princes, who had inherited merely the eccen- 
tricities or the obstinacy of their ancestors! 
Happily, the object I pursue can be secured 
without crossing the desert. We may skirt 
it where it borders on civilisation. In 
plainer words, my concern is with Prussia's 
designs on the West, or again on the South- 
East; with Pan-Germanism and its implied 
hegemony over Europe. On the one side, 
Church and Civilisation; on the other, Kaiser 
and Kultur. 

"Kultur," by dint of repetition since 1914, 
has grown to be mere slang, and what it 
means, or whether it ever had a meaning, 
cannot be determined without some effort. 
It has a meaning, nevertheless; it fixes a 
certain ideal as the scope of endeavour among 
modern Germans; it puts into this War a 
soul of evil — that very demon which, I say, 
first haunted, and now has done to moral 
death, the Deutschland of our young enthu- 
siasm. After no small searching in confused 
and always arrogant statements by the Ger- 
mans themselves, who praise their Kultur as 
the latest and best of gospels, to be spread 



PRUSSIA'S RISE TO "KULTUR" 57 

wherever they march and conquer, I believe 
it is possible to draw the line which separates 
us from them in social philosophy. We are 
always to bear in mind that the War is a war 
of ideas; hence it derives for us the grandeur, 
nay, the holiness of a crusade ; while in genera- 
tions to come it will be celebrated, we must 
hope and do our utmost to ensure, as the 
War of Liberation. I have in few strokes 
done what I deemed so far requisite by way 
of showing the political issues in question, 
though more is to be added. Above these, 
however, rises a loftier region, within which 
the sources lie hid from which political differ- 
ences spring. Let us go up thither. 

Three words need now to be distinguished 
—Civilisation, "Bildung," and "Kultur." 
They are not equivalents, though frequently 
so treated, with necessary darkness ensuing. 
All are of late origin. Civilisation, which 
might be termed the subject-matter of Aris- 
totle's Politics, is the right manner of men 
living together so as to attain the most desir- 
able human life. Its virtues, on the received 
Greek system, are prudence, justice, fortitude, 
and temperance. It rests, therefore, on a 
moral foundation; it demands in citizens 
intelligence and valour; it uses physical force 



58 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

when reason alone will not avail; and it sub- 
mits willingly to a higher order of truths and 
energies, such as the Christian religion, when 
satisfied of those claims. Civilisation is chiefly 
mental, fashioning the character not by custom 
only, or by fear, but from within by the light 
of thought, and the harmony of a city thus 
constituted Plato compares to a mighty song. 
It is the song of Law and Freedom combining 
"in a pure concent," and in "perfect diapason." 
A prevailing amenity of manners, refinement 
of living, high tone without insolence, sim- 
plicity and yet the cultivation of the arts 
which we term liberal, with examples to 
persuade rather than to strike terror — these 
are some of the tokens by which we know 
when a State is civilised. 

I ought now to recite for my own pleasure 
a few, at least, of the sentences in which 
Pericles has praised "Athens, the eye of 
Greece, mother of arts," and model to us, 
especially under the British flag, of civilisa- 
tion altogether human, though not developed 
twenty-three centuries ago to the point that 
we have reached. There will, however, be 
a more fitting occasion when I come to the 
heroic "matter of Britain," as illustrated in 
this present struggle. I pass from the word 



PRUSSIA'S RISE TO < KULTUR" 59 

Civilisation, with its backward glances towards 
"the glory that was Greece and the grandeur 
that was Rome," and I take up for examina- 
tion the word "Bildung." 

It was coined by a master, by Johann Wolf- 
gang Goethe, who has stamped on its face his 
own image and likeness, while the reverse 
shows sovereign Zeus and his eagle at his 
side. The thunderbolt, I fancy, is wanting. 
To speak without metaphor, "Bildung" corre- 
sponds closely to the word "Culture," as most 
of us, taught by Matthew Arnold, would apply 
it. "Bildung," then, is the liberal education 
formerly given at our universities, but con- 
tinued by the man himself in after-life, and 
combining literature, art, and science, accord- 
ing to individual capacity, so that the result 
shall be a nature lifted to the heights of "per- 
sonality," self-poised, enlightened, realised to 
the full. Goethe's vow is thrice famous: "Im 
Ganzen, Guten, Schonen, resolut zu leben" — 
"to live stedfastly in the idea of the Whole, 
the Good, and the Fair." If we define Civilisa- 
tion as reason ordering the relations of men to 
one another in society, we may define "Bild- 
ung" as reason ordering the relations of the 
individual to itself; in other words, to the 
intelligent plan disclosed in the universe. 



60 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

When its inspiration is supremely successful, 
the philosopher comes forth, "a spectator of 
all time and all existence." Plato, Spinoza, 
Goethe himself, Emerson, exhibit under their 
several aspects this true notion of Culture. 

When I missed on Goethe's "golden 
rondure" the thunderbolt of Zeus, I meant 
it not as rebuke but distinction. Culture is 
light, not force. Ideas have power in their 
quality of reason; but "why and wherefore" 
differ from "shall and will." "Pacem summa 
tenent," "peace reigns on the heights," sang 
our sad philosopher-poet, Lucretius. And 
Goethe himself, and Emerson afterwards, have 
noted that the intellect is not swayed by 
interest. Its kingdom is not of this world 
in any Baconian sense that "knowledge is 
power." The contemplative man desires no 
power. He dwells in that land very far off 
where power cannot come. Hence it was that 
the great — deservedly great — German thinkers 
and poets of the eighteenth century were 
cosmopolite, or would have welcomed with 
Immanuel Kant a system of perpetual peace. 

Let it not be said, by the way, that, Kant 
being a Prussian, my description of that 
unsmiling people is refuted. Kant was of 
Scottish descent and showed it by his 



PRUSSIA'S RISE TO "KULTUR" 61 

power of thought, by his caution even in the 
boldest enterprise undertaken by mortal man, 
in his dry and sly humour, and his practical 
reason. However, this shall be a digression. 
To return. The Germans, from 1750 on- 
wards, who created a revolution in thought, 
were all partisans of the pure idea. Lessing, 
Herder, Schiller, Goethe, and the youthful 
Fichte, had as little conception of "Deutsch- 
land, mein Vaterland," as Frederick the Great, 
whose main ambition was to be a bad French 
poet. For all these, Germany did not exist 
as a country "in rerum natural The unique 
Jean Paul, least French of all men created, 
proves by the absurd mixture in his name (a 
magpie mixture ) , that he, dwelling at Hof in 
Voigtland, would not have flown out angrily 
had the rare tourist mistaken him for a French 
subject. That is quite as wonderful as 
Carlyle's endless preoccupation with Voltaire. 
But it is demonstration plain that the German 
of a hundred and twenty years ago was not 
a patriot and had no country, as we now 
interpret this challenging word. 

Mind you, reader of another age and taste, 
I love Jean Paul Richter; perhaps I am the 
sole possessor in this Shakespearian neigh- 
bourhood of his whole works. He is German 



62 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

to the core, not Prussian at all. Who could 
dream of so gentle a soul delighting to burn 
down churches, to trample in the mud the 
poor peasant's hut, and to inoculate his little 
children with germs of consumption? Horror 
unspeakable! Jean Paul was heavy, lumpish, 
naive, infantine, like the genuine old Schwab; 
but when the spirit caught him by the hair he 
flew through mid-heaven. His pathos, hu- 
mour, quaintness, wisdom, melted then into a 
sunset glow, rich with dying hues of the even- 
tide, behind them a crystalline depth, tranquil 
as eternity. This was the man who seemed 
to make even Goethe's culture a thing of 
artifice, and to transcend it by pure emotion 
like a seraph burning in God's love to unsullied 
flame. How much more was this than the 
liberal arts could give! But enough has been 
said to show what "Bildung" meant for the 
choicest German singers and sagamen in days 
unhappily gone. 

What, then, and at last, is Kultur? It is 
not civilisation in the acknowledged Western 
sense. It is most unlike "Bildung," as Goethe 
conceived that magnificent Greek idea of the 
man his own intellectual centre, asking, "How 
does the world seem to me? How am I akin 
to it?" Kultur is the idea of mechanism 



PRUSSIA'S RISE TO "KULTUR" 63 

made perfect. Pardon me, I am astonished 
at the accuracy of my own definition, which 
no living Prussian — not even Maximilian 
Harden, who is a Jew — has had the wit to 
light upon. Yet, how obvious when stated! 
The pattern of Prussia (we registered that 
truth some pages back) is Sparta. It is the 
War-State of Europe, precisely as Sparta was 
the War- State of Hellas. Blood and iron sum 
them both up. Sparta had, indeed, physical 
beauty, which in the Prussian is often replaced 
by a gigantic stature and those unmeaning 
blue eyes which Tacitus called "truces et 
cseruleos," where a fierce or cunning glitter may 
change the otherwise settled dulness. But the 
Lycurgan uniformity is unmistakable. Kultur, 
with such a race, cannot but signify brute 
strength, bending science and all mental powers 
to a military obedience, commanding, forbid- 
ding, intermeddling; as if to police the whole 
world were the sum of political wisdom. 

"How long a time lies in one little word!" 
Between "police" and "policy" there is a 
whole period of development in social ideas; 
but the Prussian lags behind. He has not 
a suspicion of the march that with infinite 
toil the race of man has accomplished, feet 
bleeding, tongue parched, but temper indomi- 



64 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

table, from serfdom to freedom. And herein 
becomes manifest the deadly sin of these 
Hohenzollerns. They scorned to learn from 
the English, who had brought their king 
to trial and execution. But could they not 
be taught by Lessing and Goethe the rudi- 
mentary lesson that mind is the creative, be- 
cause the most original, of human powers; 
and that in this way without physical force it 
will, sooner or later, control every force? No, 
they went, they are going, the clean contrary 
way. Their Kultur is not "force guided by 
intelligence," but "intelligence submitting 
itself to force"; it is Sparta magnified to 
the dimensions of a vast empire. And, like 
Sparta, it is doomed by the law working 
within it to fall. 

"Sparta," said Robespierre, haranguing the 
Convention which he executed in batches, 
"Sparta is a flash of lightning through the 
darkness of antiquity." His faith went to an 
absolute system, a people under constrained 
vows, an ideal that shaped with an axe and 
reigned by the sword's edge. He justified the 
Lacedaemonian rigour because it turned out 
citizens on a mould, all alike, none apart. 
The thought of Lycurgus, it would appear, 
was military by design, contemplating the 



PRUSSIA'S RISE TO "KULTUR" 65 

State as an engine of war which required from 
its men and women not any skill in the liberal 
arts, nor eloquence, nor self -culture for its own 
sake, but the narrow, severe, utterly detached 
temperament of submission, not to be moved 
by pity or love. The State was their father 
and mother, its command their sufficient 
warrant for cruel deeds done in cold blood 
and exactions driving the conquered cities 
they held to despair. Hence Euripides called 
them the most hated of all nations. It is a 
passage so apt to my reasoning that I will 
venture on a rude paraphrase: the suffering 
Andromache cries out, in her affliction, against 
Spartan Menelaus — 

"O mortals most hate-worthy unto men, 
Dwellers at Sparta, crooked in your designs, 
Ye kings of lies, mechanics of all ill, 
Twisting and turning, nought in you is sound, 
Nor in your thoughts ; by wrong ye thrive in Greece." 

An English commentator remarks of Euripides 
that "he seemed to have disliked them [the 
Spartans] just for those vices which to every 
virtuous man are peculiarly odious; because 
they were deceitful, treacherous, fond of gain, 
lax in their public morals, unscrupulous in 
their political relations." But once more it 
is needful to insist on the specific difference 



66 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

between vices indulged through frailty or sud- 
den passion, and what I may set down as the 
heresy of justifying crime by reasons of State. 
And if the entire policy of government is 
carried forward on such principles, what shall 
we say? I reply that any government so 
doing is profoundly inhuman. "Force should 
be right," then, and this inversion gives us 
the doctrine of "Kultur," in Berlin as in 
Lacedsemon. 

Since I first thought of this little book, it 
has come upon me ever more strongly that in 
front of the Prussian trenches we are attack- 
ing stands Thomas Carlyle. Modern Prussia 
with its General Staff, its nation under 
arms, its bureaucracy, its Kaiser, is only 
Frederick the Great multiplied into depart- 
ments, or centred and reincarnate in his 
successor. But to Carlyle, though not with- 
out misgivings, Frederick was "the Hero as 
King." And by the "Hero" we are bidden 
to understand something like a divine appari- 
tion. In three pages and a half of hard 
swearing (Frederick, i. 143-6), our venerable 
Sage of Chelsea denounces, calling it "a 
doctrine of devils," the opinion widely held 
by onlookers including Voltaire, that the 
Hohenzollerns, and Frederick in particular, 



PRUSSIA'S RISE TO "KULTUR" 67 

made their ascent to high fortune "in the 
way of adroit Machiavellism." He, the not 
yet extinct volcano, breaks out in fire and 
flame over a book of uncertain authorship, 
Les Matinees du Roi de Prusse, which has 
the audacity to put upon Frederick himself 
the confession of these diabolical principles. 
Well, I am not concerned just now with any 
nameless author; and Frederick's yea or nay 
would leave the matter exactly where he found 
it. The work in question, I must add, is said 
to be extant in Frederick's own writing ; it was 
used by Von Treitschke for his biography of 
the king; and its profanity, wit, and shrewd- 
ness might well bear the royal sign-manual. 

Carlyle, volcanically but not greatly to our 
enlightenment, is eager to persuade us that 
"adroit Machiavellism" never prospers in God's 
world; but Prussia has prospered; therefore 
Prussia took no lessons from Machiavel. To 
this doubtless well-meant reasoning the answer 
of historians, who need not be "godless dul- 
lards," is "let us go by facts." Let us in other 
chapters, I say, follow "Kultur" swiftly down 
the centuries to our own time, from Frederick 
the Great to William II. 



CHAPTER IV 



The Royal Caste and Realism in Politics 

IN writing the Life of Frederick the Great, 
Carlyle used or consulted some two thou- 
sand books, great and small. If much reading 
gave soundness of judgment, and industry 
without a parallel brought light corresponding, 
this should be the truest biography in print 
since printing was. And yet the reverse, in 
most essential points, nay in the moral effect 
as a whole, is what came of toil so prodigious. 
The veteran of Cheyne Row did not explain 
to Europe the phenomenon we call Prussia; 
neither will his summing up of Frederick as 
a man or a king bear the criticism of simple 
good sense. It is a melancholy reflection. 
For had the genius of the writer "blazed up" 
round his subject with an illumination of right 
principle, instead of the flame and smoke due 
to perverse theory, England might have been 
warned in time of the danger that now threat- 
ens her existence. Dr Sarolea calls the Life of 

68 



THE ROYAL CASTE IN POLITICS 69 

Frederick mischievous. It is too little to say. 
Carlyle's last enterprise was a national disaster. 

I remember a shrewd critic of books, the 
late Mr. Triibner, observing to me, "What 
has Carlyle added to our knowledge of the 
times of Frederick the Great except his own 
humours and eccentricities?" One of our 
Ambassadors at Berlin — best known as Lord 
Odo Russell — would have replied, "Well, he 
has written the wittiest book in the world." 
And who could have done for us battle-pieces 
so precise yet so humanly alive, as if some 
mental smokeless powder had taken the place 
of Horace Vernet's circus-like performances 
on canvas at Versailles? No, I will not echo 
Mr. Triibner 's hard saying. This, however, 
remains to be noted, that Carlyle, so far as I 
am aware, did not attempt to meet the definite 
charges of perfidy brought against his hero — 
a perfidy made the chief hinge of policy ( Welt- 
politik) over and over again by Frederick. He 
is content, if one may judge by his silence, that 
this king's murderous ambition should have set 
the world on fire. 

Macaulay, who represents the average Eng- 
lishman's moral sense, has, in a passage to 
my mind unanswerable, summed up the 
ethics of the first Silesian war: "The whole 



70 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

world sprang to arms. On the head of Fred- 
erick is all the blood which was shed in a war 
which raged during many years and in every 
quarter of the globe, the blood of the column 
of Fontenoy, the blood of the mountaineers 
who were slaughtered at Culloden. The evils 
produced by his wickedness were felt in lands 
where the name of Prussia was unknown ; and 
in order that he might rob a neighbour whom 
he had promised to defend, black men fought 
on the coast of Coromandel, and red men 
scalped each other by the Great Lakes of 
North America." 

To all that is said in these convincing words 
a dread parallel offers itself now full in our 
sight. For Frederick read William, and the 
resemblance in act as in diplomacy starts up 
complete. Neither is it a chance coincidence. 
Few Englishmen, and I suppose hardly any 
Englishwomen, could pass an examination in 
the merest outlines of that world-war which 
centred from 1740 to 1763 about the Austrian 
Succession. They know even less of the "Great 
Elector" Frederick William, whose adroit and 
unprincipled turning from one side to the 
other a century before that war made Branden- 
burg "a great country, or already on the way 
towards greatness." Carlyle says euphe- 



THE ROYAL CASTE IN POLITICS 71 

mistically (an odd thing to have to say about 
Carlyle) that "Friedrich Wilhelm's aim, in 
this as in other emergencies, was sun-clear to 
himself, but for the most part dim to every- 
body else. He had to walk very warily . . . 
he had to wear semblances, to be ready with 
evasive words, and advance noiselessly by 
many circuits." 

And thereby at the Peace of Westphalia he 
gained one half of Pomerania, together with 
what statesmen have agreed to call the "secu- 
larised" — but they were quite plainly the 
"stolen" — bishoprics of Magdeburg, Halber- 
stadt, and Minden. In 1656 he fought in the 
battle of Warsaw against John Casimir, King 
of Poland, then went over to his side, being 
a man, says Carlyle once more, advancing in 
circuits, or "spirally, face now to east, now 
to west, with his own reasonable private aim 
sun-clear to him all the while." At any rate, 
he contrived by such spiral movements to get 
rid of the homage due, as we saw in our first 
chapter, from Prussia to the Polish crown. At 
the Peace of Oliva, May 1660, Ducal Prussia 
began thus crookedly its upward march to 
greatness. The shifty Elector could not 
keep, though he won by fighting, Swedish 
Pomerania. Nor was he permitted by Leopold 



72 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

of Austria to annex the Silesian Duchies, a 
claim to which he put forward on some private 
family arrangement made long ago with the 
Dukes of Liegnitz. And this peculiar de- 
mand, based on "Heritage Fraternity,' ' brings 
me to another cardinal omission in Carlyle's 
ten big volumes, which goes to the very tap- 
root of our War now raging. 

I write out for you here in legible characters, 
dear British reader, two German words, beauti- 
ful to behold, Miibelehnung and Erbverbriid- 
erung; the first of which signifies that two 
parties stand in the relation of holder and heir 
in reversion, should the original line fall ex- 
tinct, to a dignity in fief; and the second, not 
unlike the first, is a covenant of reciprocal suc- 
cession on failure of either House. These were 
pacts of old time, but later they were not recog- 
nised in law among German princes. Thanks 
to the first, however, Prussia fell to the line of 
the Great Elector ; and by virtue of the second 
he laid claim to the Silesian Duchies, thus open- 
ing a pretext for the War of 1740, which in due 
time blossomed, with fruits of death, into the 
Seven Years War. 

The point I am driving at comes now in view. 
Have you reflected, good, easy Briton, that 
these "Pacts," "Co-infiefments," "Brothers- 



THE ROYAL CASTE IN POLITICS 73 

in-Arms-Covenants," were all made without 
consulting the serfs or subjects thus handed 
about, shovelled to and fro like so much dead 
weight, treated in short as stock and fix- 
tures, by the potentates big and little who dis- 
posed of them absolutely? This Carlyle de- 
scribes as "the right to dispose of said Lands" 
— but he omits the unsaid People who went 
along with the Lands — "in any manner of 
way"; and he quotes the legal terms, "by 
written Testament, or by verbal on their death- 
bed, they can, as they see wisest, give away, 
sell, pawn, dispose of, and exchange these said 
lands to all lengths, and with all manner of 
freedom." 

Reflect what such "freedom" in the high 
contracting parties will mean for the other par- 
ties, not high and without share in the contract 
that henceforth determines the extent of their 
"life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." The 
lands in question were not private estates but 
lordships carrying with them more or less of 
sovereignty, and as a rule human beings were 
taken into the bargain without chance of appeal 
from it. Those long rolling words, Mit- 
belehnung and Erbverbrilderung mean pre- 
cisely that the mass of the German Nation 
were just "property." They belonged to the 



74 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

reigning House. On such a plea was it that 
Frederick II claimed Silesia; for such an end 
he fought or caused to be fought some eighteen 
pitched battles, laid waste large tracts of the 
Fatherland, brought unspeakable miseries on 
his own dominions, and earned the title of 
"Great." 

That government by consent of the governed 
is the only true conception of a civilised State 
never, I believe, so much as occurred in his 
most benevolent moods to a prince or princeling 
of the genuine German stock. Their political 
scheme was always tribal. Their subjects were 
their family, extended to all who dwelt under 
their rule. Inheritance and exchange, when 
bare conquest — Faustrecht — had done its work, 
determined who should be master of these 
serfs; to ask their consent would have seemed 
not unlike taking the votes of a flock of sheep 
before choosing their butcher. It is notorious 
that the German princes sold their troops, 
Hessians, Saxons, and as we have just seen in 
the case of the Great Elector, Prussians, to 
the highest bidder. Subjects must be soldiers 
and soldiers were food for cannon ; but whether 
they stood in front of these particular guns or 
behind them depended on the price their owner 
got for hiring his men out to kill and be killed. 



THE ROYAL CASTE IN POLITICS 75 

Hence the German military service appears 
to have been always brutal on the officers' part, 
cringing and doglike on the part of the rank 
and file. Unlimited beating was their portion 
of the family rights. Indignities too revolting 
for mention in such a book as I am writing, 
outrages on our common humanity in the per- 
sons of these wretched slaves, driven by them 
not unfrequently to suicide, have marked as 
with bleeding wounds and livid weals the story 
of German militarism, from the Thirty Years 
War down to the campaigns going forward 
while I pen these lines. It is a record of shame 
and horror perhaps unexampled in the misery 
thus inflicted age after age, and with appeal to 
divine right for its warrant, on men so tamed, 
so down, that they, at extremity, would kill 
themselves to escape more anguish, but never 
dream of bringing their tormentor to account 
with a rifle. Such training in moral cowardice, 
the very heart of Prussian Kultur, has been 
the most powerful instrument — we know it now 
— ever forged against the world's welfare. It 
beats out of its unhappy victim all conscience 
except the word of command. 

Yet a Briton like our really "pitiful-hearted 
Titan" Carlyle was bewitched by the strong 
man armed, and has no word of compassion 



76 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

for his victims, though ever so much better 
informed than Thackeray or Macaulay of the 
frightful lengths to which that tyranny had 
gone in the past. We have now to add, from 
the day when Carlyle ended his vast mislead- 
ing apology of Frederick II, another fifty-two 
years to the indictment. Unhappily, Frederick 
is not, in his biographer's sense, "hitherto the 
last of the Kings." How much of our present 
desolation would never have racked our minds 
and torn civilised life to pieces, had he proved 
so! But from these facts we can draw con- 
clusions not dependent on Mornings with the 
King of Prussia, nor open to doubt. 

Aristotle, we read in our earlier pages, would 
not allow that a State is merely a family en- 
larged. And of governments he says, "One is 
adapted to the nature of freemen, the other 
to that of slaves." Then he continues, "Do- 
mestic government is a monarchy, for that is 
what prevails in every house; but a political 
State is a government of free men and equals." 
The German Lord of War calls his soldiers, 
"Kinder," "you children," as belonging to his 
own family; he treats them as slaves. No 
German State was at any time the government 
of free men and equals. Heine bade his 
audience observe that German princes sat on 



THE ROYAL CASTE IN POLITICS 77 

nearly all the thrones of Europe, and that they 
fought or conspired everywhere against liberty. 
Professor Haeckel charges England with guilt 
as the "destroyer of nations," who has brought 
on this tremendous "Kultur-tragedy." What 
can be his drift, unless that the British Consti- 
tution, known more and more as enlightenment 
spreads, provoking other peoples to claim what 
it offers, is threatening the reign of a ' 'family" 
— and "herile" — despotism? Haeckel grants 
by implication that the Prussian- Austrian so- 
called war of defence is a war of reaction. The 
two Kaisers may turn out, if worsted in battle, 
to be the last of the Carlylean kings ; their gov- 
ernment, "adapted to the nature of slaves," 
may become an extinct form of political evo- 
lution. It is high time indeed. But men of 
science, if Germans, are preparing to mourn 
its decease. 

Have you not reflected sometimes, my good 
reader — I have, often — on the wide waste of 
human life and treasure caused by Wars of 
the Roses, Wars of the Spanish and Austrian 
Succession, Wars of Don Carlos and Donna 
Isabella — all for what? To decide which 
family, or which one of a family, should rule 
the passive people. That under a Republican 
form of government these apparently insane 



78 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

contests are made impossible is, of course, 
obvious; but much more should be registered 
to its credit. The temper out of which they 
sprang, with its blind attachment to persons 
rather than principles, its disdain of the com- 
mon good, its hatred of law and infatuated 
Legitimism, carries us back to the Tribe at 
odds with itself or, as we now say, in a con- 
dition of disintegrated personality. 

I grant, on the other side, that Wars of the 
Roses may be real struggles of parts not yet 
thoroughly fused, of Celt and Saxon, for in- 
stance; or again, of conflicting ideas, as be- 
tween the old and the new regime in Spain. 
But these problems are aggravated and seldom 
rightly solved, when thrown into the shape of 
dynastic disputes. The Tudors could not have 
ruled absolutely, nor have made the English 
change their religion, perhaps, at all; in any 
case, it would not have been a sordid chapter 
in the Divorce Court; unless the great houses 
had been ahnost extinguished during the quar- 
rel of the White and Red Roses. 

Consider again what wars have arisen out of 
royal marriages and the claims following them. 
We have often heard the Latin tag approved, 
"Tu, felix Austria, nube." Austria was to 
win many titles and millions of subjects by 



THE ROYAL CASTE IN POLITICS 79 

repeated wedlock. This name, however, did 
not signify the Austrian people but the House 
of Habsburg. It was a question of Archdukes 
and Archduchesses; the chattels, persons, and 
communities affected were the dowry that went 
with settlements. I possess a rare and splendid 
edition of Lucian's works, published at Am- 
sterdam by Wet stein in 1743, which was dedi- 
cated to Maria Theresa, Queen of Hungary, 
but not yet Roman Empress. Her titles of 
honour and dominion, I find on counting them, 
show the young lady to have been in that year 
of comparative humility five times a Queen, 
fifteen times a Duchess, twice a Princess, five 
times a Marchioness, five times a Countess, 
four times a Lady, once over certain salt mines 
— all in her own right ; and by marriage, twice 
a Duchess and once a Grand Duchess; in all, 
thirty-nine articles or items of rank and 
style. 

Maria Theresa was thus expected to make 
laws for a confused medley of nations from 
the Slavonic March to Flanders, and from the 
Adriatic to the North Sea, or if not to make 
yet to sign them. But every piece on the 
huge chessboard was movable at the discre- 
tion of a Minister at Vienna such as her 
Prince von Kaunitz, to whom the people were 



80 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

pawns and the territories farms bringing in 
revenues for his various wars, prompted by- 
reasons of State — in plain terms by intrigue 
and personal aims. 

History is made up of dynastic rivalries, into 
which the welfare of the nations hacked and 
hewn to support them did not directly enter, 
while it was sacrificed on the altar of secret 
diplomacy. These Austrian marriages created 
not so much an empire (and never have they 
brought forth United States), but rather a 
menagerie of discordant peoples struggling to 
be free of one another. Czechs and Germans ; 
Hungarians and Croatians; Slovenes, Ital- 
ians, Ruthenes, — what under the rule of Habs- 
burg until this day were they all but 
oppressors or oppressed? The crown, Im- 
perial or Apostolic, proved itself to be no prin- 
ciple of cohesion ; at best, it was a golden chain. 
Austria deserves the Homeric epithet, "man- 
devouring"; it consumed races but neither 
civilised nor attached them. Royal German 
marriages, producing a royal caste, or at any 
rate, as rude journalism lately cries, a trade 
union of crowned heads, have become a 
peril to Europe. We all know it ; a few dare 
to say it ; and reticence now means nothing but 
polite seeming. 



THE ROYAL CASTE IN POLITICS 81 

So then: "Tu, felix Austria, nube," may be 
taken down from its pride of place and flung 
by the herald into that gloomy vault of the 
Capuchins where the Habsburgs lie dead in 
state. Henceforth, we had better speak of the 
Dowager Lady Austria, to whom the Allies 
may vote an ample widow's jointure with be- 
coming weeds. A semi-divine caste, riddled as 
are so many Royal Houses by the penalties 
which follow upon consanguineous unions, has 
been sentenced at the judgment-seat of com- 
mon sense, of history, and of this very war. 
Moreover, Washington, if not Paris, long has 
been showing a more excellent way. Not as 
though we need hold Republican views in the 
abstract because we have come so far from the 
strange illusions of Jacobite and Legitimist. 
In the spirit of Burke himself, who lamented 
the age of chivalry, but who looked on politics 
and government as a practical affair, we should 
esteem royalty in a given case by the benefits 
it has conferred on its subjects, or by the 
hindrance to freedom and progress entailed 
in keeping it up. The only Divine Right of 
Kings, as of superiors generally, is the right 
to serve those well over whom they are set. 
To serve thus is to reign; that is the whole 
mystery of kingship. 



82 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

But the Royal Caste, thanks to its idols 
and idolators, has been brought up in the 
belief that it exists for itself, is what logicians 
call "bonwm in se"\ intrinsically good and 
necessary to European civilisation. These are 
superstitions. Wantonly to oust a family from 
the throne, on which it represents the historical 
permanence of a nation, would be as great a 
fault as to hold it canonised there in spite of 
its vices, errors, and effective disloyalty to the 
Commonwealth. The Romanoffs, even since I 
began my present volume, have been weighed 
and found wanting. The Habsburgs it was, 
and not their many nations, who plunged 
Europe into this frightful adventure, knowing 
how little they owed to Prussia which was 
egging them on, and surely less discerning 
even than of old if they imagined that Berlin 
would let them keep the chief spoils of battle. 

And what shall we say of the Hohenzollems 
themselves? They, indeed, won by wedlock 
and family ties, by Mitbelehnung or Erbver- 
bru&erung, claims to expansion which the 
Great Elector and the Great Frederick might 
enforce at the sword's point. Had they been 
in quest of a motto corresponding pretty 
nearly with Austria's in weight and metre, 
this perhaps would have served: "Tu, ferox 



THE ROYAL CASTE IN POLITICS 83 

Prussia, caede," or "Savage Prussia, strike 
hard." That they did strike hard and get their 
booty, a remarkable passage from the now rare 
volume, Letters Concerning the Present State 
of Poland, published in London, 1773, will 
sufficiently illustrate. Elsewhere I have des- 
cribed this quotation as "a retrospect and a 
prophecy." Let the reader judge. The author 
was, it appears, a Rev. Mr. Lindsey, tutor to 
the nephew of King Stanislaus Poniatowski, 
and he wrote on the morrow of the First Par- 
tition. In Letter IV, p. 80, these very signifi- 
cant words may be found — 

"If you consider with attention the conduct 
of the House of Brandenburgh from the time 
of the Margrave Albert to this hour, by what 
various pretences it has augmented its domains : 
first, a feudal duchy torn from Poland; then 
that duchy erected into an independent 
sovereignty; then new territories added to 
it; on another side, the duchy of Cleves, 
the counties of Marck and Ravensberg, the 
bishoprics of Minden and Camin, together 
with the eastern parts of Pomerania, acquired 
by the Treaty of Westphalia; the better half 
of Swedish Pomerania acquired afterwards; 
the seizure of Silesia by the present King 
(Frederick II) ; the duchy of Prussia erected 



84 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

into a kingdom; that kingdom now more than 
doubled; almost all the rivers which empty 
into the Baltic secured to him ; — you must allow 
that this house has pursued a plan of aggran- 
disement with a perseverance and success that 
ought to engage the attention of every State 
in Europe." 

So much, certainly, you must allow; and 
more also. For if Austria looks like a 
"ramshackle Empire" in the Liberal eyes of 
Mr. Lloyd George, it is certain that Prussia 
— the machine-made and otherwise loose- 
jointed confederacy stretching from the 
Niemen to the Rhine — is a State hammered 
and welded into an Army The mad father 
of Frederick the Great constructed this war- 
machine; Frederick set it in motion, and 
under him it ground its enemies to powder on 
the right hand and the left. Two battles won 
in thirty days; Rossbach over the French, on 
November 5, 1757, and Leuthen over the 
Austrians a month later, on December 5 of 
the same year, proclaimed to East and West 
that Prussia had become a Great Power. At 
Zorndorf, August 26 — September 2, 1758, the 
Russians were taught by a fearful expenditure 
of life and the agony of defeat a lesson as 
convincing. 



THE ROYAL CASTE IN POLITICS 85 

These three combats on different fronts and 
all victorious may be said to have fixed in 
bronze the Prussian idea of war, and with 
it of the State. It did not resemble the 
French, for France had a long and triumphant 
record of glories other than military. It was 
most unlike the British, at that time more than 
ever opposed to standing armies, and favour- 
ing private adventure as the simplest way to 
win empires. The idea of Kultur as mechan- 
ism made perfect found itself, so to speak, on 
those bloodstained fields where the finest armies 
of Europe went down before its onset. Hence- 
forth Hohenzollern was the War-Lord. The 
dynasty ruled the machine; and the machine 
upheld the dynasty. That is what William II 
has thundered out in his proclamations; he is 
the sword of the Lord, and his law is 
God's law. "If any man resists me," said this 
new Tamburlaine, "him I will smash." A brief 
Evangel ! 

And thus we perceive what comes of mistak- 
ng the State for a family, against Aristotle and 
reason. It did away with all hope of seeing 
Prussia first, and Germany afterwards, develop 
into the "government of free men and equals." 
For since this "family" had, by Divine Right, 
a ruler who was responsible to God alone, its 



86 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

one duty was obedience. And as the Prussian 
dominions lay geographically open to attack 
on all sides, every war which the King resolved 
to wage might be called a war of self-defence. 
And this wide-scattered realm could be de- 
fended only by a trained army, always on the 
alert. There was no way more direct to raise 
such an army than to make every youth a po- 
tential soldier, to discipline the whole nation 
by the sabre and the cane, to revive Sparta in 
modern form, and to consider peace and war 
as episodes in a general policy which aimed at 
aggression and meditated conquest. "Tu, 
ferox Prussia, caede." 

Frederick's policy, then, which has been that 
of his House, cannot be absolved (to please 
Carlyle) from the charge of Machiavellism. 
And this for the plain reason that Machiavel 
reduces politics or statecraft to a pure scheme 
of forces without ethics, which forces consist 
of violence and cunning. Carlyle himself 
argued, "What is a Right that cannot trans- 
late itself into a Might?" The exceedingly 
immoral deduction that "Might is Right" lay 
close at hand. But Frederick, let it be owned, 
did not trouble himself in any enterprise, from 
the rape of Silesia to the dismembering of 
Poland, about abstract Right or Wrong. He 



TH E ROYAL CASTE IN POLITICS 87 

played with statements of "rights" in a diplo- 
matic sense; he could finesse and dictate notes 
for the bewigged lawyers of the Aulic Coun- 
cil; his real argument was delivered with 
amazing accuracy from the cannon's mouth. 
As Frederick, so Bismarck; as either or both, 
Kaiser Wilhelm the Faithful. He is, indeed, 
"der Treue," true to type, loyal to his family 
tradition. 

We, who have grown up on a system of 
freedom, private and public, where no privi- 
leges by divine appointment hinder the course 
of law and justice, but all say their say, and 
the nation's verdict is final in matters of 
State, cannot even by severe exertion imagine 
a Superman — I fear the hybrid term must be 
allowed — whose personal caprices, which he 
is pleased to label heavenly decisions, shall have 
the force of law. Yet such a Superman the 
Kaiser sees when he looks at himself in the 
glass. It is bad philosophy and history out 
of date; it is the mental condition well known 
to certain doctors as la folie des grandeurs; 
it was the disease of the Caligulas and the 
Neros; an excited, feverish possession of a 
brain not other than abnormal by an idea, 
fixed and ever-pressing on it — which reduces 
all other men to puppets, and sends millions 



88 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

to suffering and death as in a day-dream, 
touched by no motive except colossal and 
homicidal vanity. 

Frederick the Great died in 1786, three years 
before the French began their Revolution. He 
had no suspicion of the storm which was com- 
ing up from the West. Neither he nor any 
one in Europe dreamt of a pale student — Cor- 
sican by birth and Italian, or even Florentine, 
by cast of intellect, then seventeen years old 
— who would eclipse his fame and drown it 
in oblivion by victories far more widely trum- 
peted than Rossbach or Leuthen. The modern 
German, however, brings these two soldier- 
chiefs together and bows down before them 
both. 

In moments of exaltation Kaiser Wilhelm 
fancies that he is the Great Frederick, whose 
portrait he keeps ever at hand, come again 
in mind and feature. Napoleon has been 
seriously claimed by others than Herr H. S. 
Chamberlain as a Teuton of almost pure 
breed, on the evidence of his fair hair and 
blue-grey eyes. To the Berlin Valhalla he 
must belong, since he bodies forth the unmixed 
power of intellect, obedient to a will that 
knew no bounds, which made him conqueror 
of the West. Neither Jena with its ignominy 



THE ROYAL CASTE IN POLITICS 89 

nor Waterloo, which the Kaiser has resolved 
into a purely Prussian triumph, can check 
this idolatrous deification of a hero to whom 
Deutschland was a country made to be 
plundered, and its sons a horde of indifferent 
fighting men. 

But the sum of these things is Machiavelli's 
"little masterpiece," The Prince. Carlyle 
thought enough and too much had been 
made of it, as though his entire biography 
of Frederick were not, so to speak, its last 
illustrated edition. Csesar Borgia, "der alte 
Fritz," Napoleon, may well adorn its gallery of 
portraits. The Florentine secretary drew his 
maxims from life; and these later slayers of 
men prove them once more to be available, 
■ — up to a certain point. The State, on that 
showing, has no ethics save its own advantage. 
It is not lawless, for the Prince is its law. In 
current scientific language, though going back 
to our English philosopher Hobbes, there is 
no power, no principle, no interest which is 
entitled to challenge the supremacy, or can 
escape the jurisdiction, of the civil order, 
incarnate now in an Emperor of the French 
and now in a German Kaiser. 



CHAPTER V 



From Napoleon to Bismarck 

WE seem to be witnessing the attempted 
suicide of Europe. After ages will 
refuse credence to the things which have long 
been filling our daily news with monstrous 
tales of destruction, laying waste Bel- 
gium, northern France, Serbia, Rumania; 
while Italy, our treasure-house, trembles at 
a possible descent upon its fair cities by bar- 
barians from the Stelvio Pass, and Poland is a 
desert soaked in blood, desolate under famine. 
Whose mind was it that projected outwards 
and executed these designs which even to 
contemplate shake us with preternatural fear? 
How did we tumble headlong into chaos? But 
yesterday and Britons were amusing them- 
selves over trivialities, or quarrelling about 
suffrages, or thrown out of gear by strikes 
on railways, in coal mines, wherever the men 
chose. Now we have heard ourselves called, 
not without motive, a beleaguered city; the 

90 



NAPOLEON TO BISMARCK 91 

nation is an army or a military forge; the 
navy stands between us and ruin. 

But in a time which will be ever memorable 
by reason of its peculiar calamity, when civili- 
sation, like Shakespeare's "universal wolf," 
was trying to "eat up itself," we have one com- 
fort. This is, in my view, the fifth act of a 
world-tragedy, where many knots will be un- 
tied. Name the problem "Democracy" or 
"Feudalism," or yet more boldly, "Religion," 
there lies the question put by Fate; and it is 
for us to create, not merely to find out, the 
answer, as in our own lives we must do the 
like or die. And the answer is already show- 
ing, because out of an immense confusion the 
final issues have emerged, and are more obvious 
to sight and touch than they have ever been 
before. From Frederick through Napoleon to 
Washington — these are the signs on the high- 
road of history. Beyond them I see the hills 
of God. 

It is a curious reflection; these three men 
lived at the same time, overlapping one 
another, of course, but leading in the period 
which, until August 1914, we thought our 
own. Let us recall the dates : Frederick, 1712- 
1786; Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821; and 
Washington, 1732-1799. Behind the storms 



92 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

of war these three ride, as Choosers of the 
Slain. For the world's future as opening now 
to prophetic eyes, Napoleon mediates between 
the Prussian King and the American Presi- 
dent, though himself last to die; since ideals 
are seen or dreamt of long before they come 
to be perfect in time. Europe will be saved 
by the spirit which breathed in Washington, 
and I shall have great things to say concerning 
America. It was, however, Napoleon who 
broke the old order on this side of the Atlantic, 
abolished the Holy Roman Empire, and gave 
Prussia free scope to become the paramount 
power in Germany. 

Napoleon was the "armed soldier of the* 
Revolution"; but a demonic force works by 
action and reaction all round its starting point ; 
and the man who created a Kingdom of Italy 
which led up to Italy "One and Indivisible," 
was the same whose unjust attack on the 
Venetian Republic, and his old-world bargain- 
ing, brought the Austrians to encamp in St. 
Mark's Place for near upon seventy years. By 
his repeated blows the settlement of Germany 
effected at the Peace of 1648 was shattered. 
His own crazy kingdom of Westphalia, with his 
Rhenish Confederation, could no more be found 
after Waterloo. It was Napoleon who enabled 



NAPOLEON TO BISMARCK 93 

the Prussians to set up their "Watch on the 
Rhine." For he pursued, whether knowing it 
or not, the policy of Richelieu towards Austria, 
despising Brandenburg, which had fallen into 
a helpless condition after Frederick's time. 
And he refused obstinately to forbode the con- 
sequences should his vast empire not hold to- 
gether when he was gone. 

Summing up, it is not too much to say that 
Napoleon left as a possible inheritance to some 
future Hohenzollern a new Germanic Empire, 
and the hegemony of Europe. By reaction he 
called into being the Holy Alliance, which was 
nothing but autocracy masquerading as re- 
ligion. For he, too, was an autocrat, self- 
made, but intent on founding a dynasty, like 
any other fortunate adventurer of his type. He 
envied Washington's fame; he was not great 
enough to imitate him. Freedom had little to 
expect from the Napoleons, as events proved. 
The idea of Democracy is not equality of servi- 
tude. On the whole, Bonaparte with tireless 
vigour centralised government, simplified 
methods, mechanised art and literature — all 
which ends in Prussian Kultur. He left Ger- 
many as a house swept and garnished, ready 
for the spirit more wicked than himself to enter 
in and dwell there. 



94 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

Historians of the War of Liberation in 1813 
have seen these facts, but in a light too favour- 
able to the Hohenzollerns. The Tugendbund, 
or League of Virtue, the German uprising, 
with Leipzig and Waterloo victories, appear in 
Teuton prose and verse like divine wonders 
wrought by Stein,. Scharnhorst and the other 
statesmen, at the beck and call of their Prus- 
sian master, the princes of the Fatherland join- 
ing in. I must except Heine. "At their all- 
high command," says the ironical Jew, "we 
Germans rose and fought for freedom: always, 
you know, we do what our sovereigns tell us." 
To drive out the foreigner was to free Ger- 
many from Napoleon and his lieutenants: but 
of liberty in an English or true democratic 
sense, not a word ! 

The Austrian Metternieh. also named Mit- 
ternacht — ''the Prince of Darkness" — reigned 
from 1815 to 1848. A man of infinite charm, 
wit. dexterity, without scruples or deep con- 
victions, he. if any one. could have restored the 
sceptre to the Habsburgs. by which, during 
well nigh six centuries, they ruled at Frankfort 
over the wide German lands. But Xapoleon 
had passed by: the resurrection was a dream. 
While Metternieh lasted and a dilettante. 
Frederick William IV. played fantastic tricks 



NAPOLEON TO BISMARCK 95 

on the throne of Prussia, no decision of the 
problems agitating Europe could be hoped for. 

Men of my age who believe in the demo- 
cratic movement, feel as if thirty good years 
had been wasted before the curtain drew up 
again which had fallen amid vehement plaudits 
on the exile at St. Helena. The history of 
those days will not be rehearsed in the great 
books of the future, or only as an interregnum. 
With Napoleon III and Bismarck the drama 
carries us into a new act — a series of acts, for 
the play is like a Japanese novel, going on 
endlessly. Carlyle's "last of the kings" had a 
successor, not the poor commonplace "William 
the Great," whom his grandson decorates in 
vain with titles at which posterity will smile, 
but Otto von Bismarck, Prussian Premier, des- 
tined to be Chancellor of the German Empire. 
Feudalism had discovered its most powerful 
representative, and autocracy delivered itself 
into his hands. 

A feudal autocracy sounds like a contradic- 
tion in terms. Yet in the Central Empires it 
is a fact. We may translate its significance 
for the plan of this book, by defining it as the 
perpetual alliance of absolute king and heredi- 
tary nobles against the rest of the nation. 
The "high and well-born" unite to govern, 



96 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

exploit, and keep in their place those who 
are not "born" at all. It is the "Almanach 
de Gotha" lording it over finance, professions, 
industry, agriculture, proletarians, by means of 
Crown, Court, Law, Army, Navy — and please 
note the capital letters, which indicate the 
power that controls whatever is worth having 
in the kingdom. 

I do not pretend to an expert knowledge of 
Prussian history; but I am unable to put my 
finger on any episode which would suggest an 
alliance of king and people to curb the nobles. 
For my purpose, therefore, Kaiserdom and 
Junkerdom are all one. Bismarck's motto in 
his Reminiscences, and still more plainly in his 
acts, was "Ego et Rex meus." He urged the 
royal person forward with whip and spur; 
when King William grew restive the statesman 
threatened to dismount. But neither steed 
nor rider had the least inclination to turn down 
the Via Nazionale. Bismarck, himself a 
Junker, held unswervingly by the ancien 
regime; he was loyal to his order while he drove 
royalty on. 

Thus in a matter of prime importance the 
new German Empire, when it came to be, 
differed, greatly to its immediate advantage, 
from the French Empire, as restored by 



NAPOLEON TO BISMARCK 97 

Napoleon III. France, we remember, had 
abolished its feudal noblesse on a night of 
frantic enthusiasm, August the Fourth, 1789. 
It was a final act. Not even the courage of 
Napoleon, though a self-crowned modern Char- 
lemagne, was equal to reviving an institution 
which democracy regards as its dearest foe. 
The conqueror of the West might make feudal 
chiefs outside France of his marshals and 
ministers; but his attempts at Counts and 
Barons of the Empire ended in names without 
power. Hence, when he fell, these fell at the 
same moment. In like manner, between 
France and the possible Republic after 1852, 
there stood but a lonely, somewhat wavering 
figure ; let him be assassinated or taken prisoner 
and the Imperial phantom would vanish, as in 
the event it did. 

But Prussia, nay Germany at large, resem- 
bles the France which existed before Richelieu 
tamed the Nobles and Louis XIV kept them 
as lackeys in his Court at Versailles. The 
feudal system lives on across the Rhine; it 
adds to the Monarchy strength and resources ; 
it is a permanent General Staff, always in 
office, let what will happen. How decisively 
it can intervene to save or to extend its own 
privileges we have often witnessed, and shall 



98 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

again before the denouement of this War plot 
is reached. Here, certainly, is the fiercest of 
entanglements, much concerning us who never 
thought to be troubled by Prussian Junkers. 
The cry goes now, "Eliminate the Hohenzol- 
lerns." Not an unjust or unwise policy, and 
kind above measure to the German people. 
Nevertheless, we are not adjudicating on Na- 
poleon III after Sedan, a general without an 
army, a king without nobles, a parvenu with- 
out a pedigree. He had no roots and withered 
away; his dynasty was planted in the sand. 
When William II prattles about Divine Right 
he is appealing, in fact, to the history of which 
he bears the burden and claims the renown. 
And so these high-flying German birds of 
prey; they have been long at this game. Of 
old they made their nest in the cedars ; to pull 
it down would be revolution. Kaiser and 
Junkers stand or fall together. To eliminate 
the Hohenzollerns a German "Fourth of 
August" will be indispensable. 

If allegations like the foregoing could be 
overthrown, who would rejoice more than I 
that make them ? But I fear they are terribly 
well founded. And the inferences from them 
are formidable. Were we fighting theory with 
theory, or institutions with institutions, the 



NAPOLEON TO BISMARCK 99 

conflict would be hard enough. But the 
Western nations, including now the United 
States, have in front of them a War-machine, 
the most heavily mounted hitherto known, 
and it is driven by a living force — I do not 
say an intelligence, but something more primi- 
tive — a tradition bred and born in the very 
nature of the men hurling their strength into 
battle. Living history so equipped has reserves 
within it of obstinacy, has fervours and enthu- 
siasms, with old associations to kindle them 
afresh. The Hohenzollern legend, medieval — 
modern, will afford to Prussians at bay senti- 
ment as powerful as the Stuart legend did to 
Jacobite Highlanders. And "old Fritz" may 
serve — like "le petit caporal" to France — to 
give Germany an object of personal devotion. 
Indeed, since Rossbach this Frenchified Vol- 
tairian, though he could not follow a German 
translation of Racine, has been forcibly taken 
to fill the part of Arminius, the devourer of 
Roman legions. But neither Frederick ixor any 
of his successors, not even William II, ever 
did consider Germany except in the light of 
a larger domain and fee-farm of Prussia. 
Never one of them was a true German patriot. 
In war they have sacrificed Bavarians and 
Saxons without mercy, while sparing their 



100 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

Pomeranians. Frederick laid Saxony waste, 
not less unconcerned at its desolation than 
William was over the ruin of Belgium, which 
"made his heart bleed" every hour he was in- 
sisting on it. I will quote Macaulay rather than 
Carlyle to show the character of a Prussian 
invader. 

"This battle (Lobositz) decided the fate of 
Saxony. Augustus and his favourite Bruhl 
fled to Poland. The whole army of the elec- 
torate capitulated. Prom that time till the 
end of the war Frederick treated Saxony as 
a part of his dominions, or rather he acted 
towards the Saxons in a manner which may 
serve to illustrate the whole meaning of that 
tremendous sentence, 'Subjectos tanquam suos, 
viles tamquam alienos.' Saxony was as much 
in his power as Brandenburg; and he had no 
such interest in the welfare of Saxony as he 
had in the welfare of Brandenburg. He ac- 
cordingly levied troops and exacted contribu- 
tions throughout the enslaved province, with 
far more rigour than in any part of his own 
dominions. Seventeen thousand men who had 
been in the camp at Pirna were half com- 
pelled, half persuaded to enlist under their 
conqueror." 

Now in the eighteenth century for one 



NAPOLEON TO BISMARCK 101 

Teuton prince to spoil and waste the lands of 
another was by no means looked upon as trea- 
son to Germany. The Fatherland, split up 
into family estates beyond counting, had lost 
whatever sense of unity it ever possessed ; and, 
truly, that was not much. Feudalism divides 
almost as the clan-system divides, or at any 
rate hinders the people who should be a single 
nation from combining into a whole. It was 
first by the war with Napoleon in 1813, then 
and far more by emigration, especially to 
America, and at last by the constraining force 
of a victorious German Empire, that a certain 
feeling of the patria, the common country, 
began to be developed. Readers of Auerbach's 
Village Stories will have noted this gradual 
change, by which a Saxon, Rhinelander, Sua- 
bian, or Hessian, found himself first of all to 
be a German, because the Yankee or the Briton 
called him so. In Chicago, nay in Milwaukee, 
"Deutschland uber Alles' , prevailed. Pressure 
from Berlin has increased the weight of this 
Germanism; and we hear of little else during 
the War, which is described by every organ of 
publication within the Reich as an assault on 
the nation. 

Nevertheless, a sentiment late and manu- 
factured is not likelv to survive the strain of 



102 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

defeat. Under all circumstances, it remains 
true that Prussia is not Germany, and con- 
versely, that Germany is not Prussia. In spite 
of D ohm's aphorism, it is not true that "the 
interests of Brandenburg and Deutschland will 
never be opposed." When Dr. Wilson drew 
his calm but crushing indictment of the auto- 
cracy at Berlin, he distinguished between the 
German people and their rulers, saying that 
America had no quarrel with the nation itself. 
From the ethical point of view it is a distinc- 
tion that requires, and I hope will repay, deli- 
cate handling. The distinction which I have 
indicated above is undoubtedly real. 

I know Munich these many years ; I cannot 
sufficiently emphasise the hatred, not free from 
contempt, with which Bavarians, high and low, 
pronounced in my hearing the name of Prussia. 
To fancy that the Catholics along the Rhine 
wish to be governed from Berlin is to forget 
many episodes of the quarrel between Church 
and State since 1815. When the Allies under- 
take, with Dr. Wilson, to eliminate the Hohen- 
zollerns, here are conditions which they will 
do well to bear in mind. As I set them down 
a gleam of hope shoots across the sky. 

These counsels are for to-morrow. We must 
now look back on the events of yesterday and 



NAPOLEON TO BISMARCK 103 

the day before, thanks to which Britain first 
and America finally have taken up arms against 
the House of Hohenzollern in defense of their 
democratic ideals. The fortunes of this feudal 
autocracy have revealed another and a contrary 
spirit, from its rise under the "Margrave 
Albert" ; and at every stage its qualities appear 
the same, while ambition grows with oppor- 
tunity. The duchy becomes a kingdom, the 
kingdom an empire; the empire lays down a 
scheme of Weltpolitik by which it is to gain 
universal dominion, so that no question shall 
be decided from China to Peru without the 
Kaiser's fiat. 

In 1815 Prussia's tentacles, already enclos- 
ing more of Poland than it has been possible to 
digest comfortably, stretched themselves to the 
Middle Rhine, Austria having given up 
Flanders, and no Great Power saying nay. 
The Church electorates of Mayence, Cologne, 
and Treves were torn out of sanctuary. A 
rich Catholic domain fell to the Lutheran 
State. On the Rhine and the Vistula one 
ruler gave laws to subjects who were by faith 
and culture aliens to him. The troubles which 
succeeded in Rhineland are matter of history. 
How the Poles suffered, but could not be 
overcome, in Posnania may be learnt from 



104 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

Bismarck and Von Bulow, men that have done 
their utmost to blot out a nation and glory in 
their shame. 

Now the kingdom of which Brandenburg 
was the centre remained as it came out from 
the Congress of Vienna, with one small excep- 
tion, until its victories over Austria in 1866 
gave North Germany into its grasp. But this 
long interval of comparative decadence pre- 
sents features that we cannot silently pass over. 
It will be memorable for the rise and fall of 
Liberalism in Germany; the futile Frankfort 
Parliament, with its dream of a democratic em- 
pire; the first distinct conception of a great 
German naval power, to be got by annexing 
Schleswig-Holstein ; and the entrance of Bis- 
marck on the scene. Every circumstance that I 
have recorded here took the nations one step 
further on the path of the world-war. In 
retrospect the chain seems adamantine, and 
each event is part of the logic of facts. Never- 
theless, had Britain chosen well and France 
been wiser, we can see that a different line of 
action lay within the bounds of possibility. 

But, on the whole, Britain with her Palmer- 
stons and Russells, her Aberdeens and Glad- 
stones, her highly regarded Prince Consort and 
his confidential adviser, Baron Stockmar, had 



NAPOLEON TO BISMARCK 105 

no definite policy in foreign affairs. To quote 
a hackneyed phrase once more, but I think 
appositely, she was always "drifting." And 
France, heroic France, hoodwinked by Louis 
Philippe, betrayed by Louis Napoleon during 
the night of December 2, 1851, submitted to 
her new Bonaparte while stabbing him with 
epigrams, and sank into lethargic prosperity. 
Meantime, the days of Frankfort came and 
went, with a man to match and overmatch 
Napoleon III issuing out of them. 

"The days of Frankfort," I said. These 
were of two periods: the one from March 1848 
till June 18, 1849, which covers the Liberal 
enterprise and ends in fiasco; the other of the 
restored Diet, where Bismarck represented 
his sovereign from 1851 until 1858. The 
point now in my aim is to bring out the 
analogy and the contrast between Germany's 
effort to win constitutional freedom and 
the English parliamentary struggle against 
Charles I. How directly all this bears on our 
actual situation no one with an eye for history 
can mistake. I am not merely drawing a 
parallel; it would be much more accurate to 
affirm that I am describing the "nodes" 
of a great movement in the human orbit, as 
the world speeds on to its goal afar off. Had 



106 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

the earlier days of Frankfort fulfilled the anti- 
cipations they awakened among Germans, no 
Bismarckian era would have come to pass. 
And it was in the latter days, from 1851 till 
1858, that the ideas of the future Chancellor 
ripened to their definite form. English states- 
men did not pay great heed to Frankfort, 
early or late. There, however, was shapen 
the problem upon which we are now staking 
our all. 

In February 1848, France, taking fire from 
Aetnean Sicily, set the Continent ablaze by 
thrusting Louis Philippe with shame out of the 
Tuileries. A most exact picture of the tragi- 
comedy is given by Flaubert in UEducation 
Sentiment ale. Bad kings, when they are de- 
posed, come to London; and the man whom 
his contemporaries called Ulysses the traveller 
took one last journey as Mr. Smith across 
the English Channel. The "year of revolu- 
tions" set in. For months it seemed as if every 
sovereign except our own would be chased 
from his capital and every country would re- 
ceive a constitution. Prince Metternich, who 
had been more than a king, sought refuge 
in London too. Palermo, Naples, Pied- 
mont, had led the dance. In Hungary, 
Bohemia, Prussia, Lombardy, the people car- 



NAPOLEON TO BISMARCK 107 

ried all before them. There was a rising in 
Berlin; and Frederick William IV, dilettante 
and mystic, already half insane, surrendered to 
its force. Adorned in the colours "schwartz- 
roth-gold," which this movement put on, the 
Hohenzollern drove through his capital and 
echoed the street cry of the "Glorious German 
Revolution." Heine, long years previously, 
declared that whenever such a crisis broke 
out its rage would excel that of the terrible 
Attila-contest in the Nibelungenlied. For a 
while the prophecy had a beginning of fulfil- 
ment. Austria collapsed; Italy sprang to 
arms; the old German Diet disappeared; 
and a Parliament democratic in tone and 
temper met at Frankfort on May 18, 1848, 
representing "United Germany." 

But neither by arms nor by debate was 
victory destined to gratify the Liberals. 
North and south of the Alps, over the whole 
Austrian Monarchy and in the Fatherland, 
the Reaction brought up its troops and 
trampled the efforts of freedom into blood- 
stained mire. What is yet more astonishing, 
the so-called German democrats in Frankfort 
applauded when Radetzky and the Tsar, and 
all that royal caste, beat the Revolution to its 
knees. Forsooth, the German name was at 



108 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

stake should Italians defeat Austrians, and no 
liberty could be worth such a price. The 
Frankfort gathering fell easily under the spell 
of pedants, constitution-mongers, and very 
bad copies of those fanatics who lorded it 
over the French Convention. After floods 
of heavy rhetoric, a scheme which excluded 
Austria got itself framed. There should be 
a new German Empire, one and democratic, 
with a Prussian Emperor for its chief. 

On April 21, 1849, the Imperial diadem was 
offered to Frederick William IV. He refused 
it in unseemly terms; he would not "pick up 
a crown out of the gutter." Not democracy 
but the German-Christian monarchy, founded, 
on Divine Right, was capable of satisfying the 
demands of justice. This peremptory refusal, 
coupled with victories all round about of the 
Holy Alliance thus renewed, took the life 
out of the Frankfort assembly. It became 
a caricature of the English Long Parliament 
reduced to a debating society; and on June 18, 
1849, the anniversary of Waterloo, some stal- 
warts who still held on and had translated it 
to Stuttgart were thrown into the street by 
the police of Wurttemberg. 

"Flebile ludibrium," observes Tacitus. 
This shameful end of German strivings after 



NAPOLEON TO BISMARCK 109 

unity and liberty was indeed ridiculous; but, 
in the light of what has happened since, it 
might well move us to grief. It boded ill 
for Europe and ourselves. The mischief 
wrought by failure of a genuine though 
unwisely managed attempt to bring about 
the German revolution by due course of 
law, never from that day could be healed. 
It went on increasing and multiplying until 
it has wrapt the world in its plague- 
stricken folds. 

One thing came out clear beyond question. 
The German, who is often an able if uncouth 
administrator, and who delights in small in- 
trigues, has no genius for politics where persua- 
sion, mutual forbearance and intelligence, fair 
play and practical good sense, are concerned. 
His temper soon gives way, and he is most 
ungenerous. He thinks and argues in terms of 
brute force. He is persistent but provocative- 
He assumes that his adversary, being his in- 
ferior, can be led astray by devices transparent 
to a child ; and he invents many of them. His 
incurable suspicion, intense yet wayward, has 
made the German critic whether of life or 
literary problems most unsure. His tendency 
has ever been to impute base motives ; and per- 
haps no mind in Europe is so capable of making 



110 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

great things look small as the thoroughbred 
Teuton. Lacking the sense of proportion he 
lays stress on trifles ; he quarrels all day long ; 
and he is very slow to forgive. 

I am painting him just now in sombre 
colours because they affect his dealings with 
opponents in politics even more than in the 
schools; but he seems everywhere in public 
life to take his stand on the fencing-floor — 
auf der Mensur. These are not the qualifica- 
tions of a wise legislator ; they account for the 
infinite factions of the Frankfort Parliament 
and its successor the Reichstag. They explain 
why German democracy has been either a 
pretence or a failure. 

One other cause of it may detain us for a 
moment. Frederick William IV put aside 
the Imperial crown offered him, on this plea 
among the rest, that he needed the approval 
of the Free Cities, which was not given. 
German Liberals had not a single German 
city, in the legal sense, at their back; most 
unlike in this to our Long Parliament which 
could always rely on London; for London, 
in Milton's superb phrase, was "the mansion 
house of liberty." The so-termed Free Cities 
were close corporations, unreformed and irre- 
formable. They wanted no democratic con- 



NAPOLEON TO BISMARCK 111 

stitution to break down their "freedoms" in 
favour of a proletarian horde. Thus Reaction 
held its own or soon recovered it. The 
Liberals were cowed into silence. Racial 
jealousies, servile armies, incapacity for po- 
litical discussions and designs, brought the 
German Revolution to an inglorious end. 
Austria got back her States and came to an 
understanding with Prussia. The convention 
of Olmutz, November 20, 1850, set up again 
the German Bund of 1815. And Bismarck in 
1851 began the second period of the days at 
Frankfort. 



CHAPTER VI 



Reaction finds its Captain-General 

IN the year 1862 the makeshift European 
status quo dating from the Congress of 
Vienna was not only doomed but expiring. 
Democracy outside England had failed, but 
could it be pronounced dead? Autocracy, it 
is true, had sent the Parliament of Frankfort 
packing; yet a Third Napoleon (who, as witty 
Frenchmen declared, was not even a second) 
had been frightened by Orsini bombs into 
making war for an idea — for "Italy free from 
the Alps to the Adriatic"; had half -beaten 
the Austrians in Lombardy; then recoiling 
before his own fears, not without help from 
Prussian armaments on the Rhine, had left 
Venice under the hated yoke. Sardinia was 
grown in 1861 to be the Italian Kingdom; 
and Garibaldi's romantic adventure had given 
the Two Sicilies — does any one remember that 
name now? — to Victor Emmanuel. 

Strange, perplexed results were springing 
out of an extraordinary, an unstable condition. 

112 



REACTION 113 



In all things the faded replica of Napoleon at 
Paris was for half-measures. Louis Napoleon 
wanted neither peace nor war, but a juste 
milieu favourable to his dynasty. Half-despot, 
half-democrat, he seemed outwardly imposing, 
while the real heaven-storming Titan took up 
the seals of government at Berlin. For eight 
years the duel of minds went on, but became 
ever less equal. Western Europe, unlucky 
in this, and to be more unlucky still, had 
entrusted its future to a dull neurotic subject, 
a pain-racked charlatan, whose very knowledge 
of the German language and character led 
him astray. England had no guide at all. 
The Prince Consort was dead, the Queen 
lived in retirement, but she wrote to King 
Leopold in passionate words of "My irrevo- 
cable decision that his views about everything 
are to be my law." 

I am old enough to recall the year 1862, 
as well as the speculations excited by Count 
Bismarck's resistance to the Prussian House 
of Representatives. Few in this country were 
familiar with his name or the matter in dis- 
pute. Fewer still knew anything of the 
constitution under which the States of the 
Hohenzollerns were governed. We heard of 
an absolute King, a Parliament opposed to 



114 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

him, and a Prime Minister who might be 
impeached. The resemblance to Charles I, 
the House of Commons in 1641, and the 
Earl of Strafford, was alluring. In fact, there 
existed the kind of analogy which arises from 
a problem capable of being solved in either 
way, according as the forces are employed. 
Had Prussian Liberals — for again there was 
a Liberal movement on foot, with a majority 
in the Lower House — had these men, I say, 
been able to reckon upon Berlin, as the 
English Commons on London, it is possible 
that Strafford's fate might have overtaken 
Bismarck. 

The contrary happened. This "bold bad 
man" — the Shakespearean adjectives fit him — 
was of Wentworth's school; but he had an 
easier task — not to make his king absolute but 
to keep him so. For Charles in England 
usurped powers not belonging to the Crown; 
whereas in Prussia the constitution left the 
royal authority an overlordship the bounds of 
which had never been set, nor could be. On 
paper the House of Representatives in Prussia 
held control of the purse, and could vote bud- 
gets or reject them. How if it did reject them? 
Would a deadlock ensue? or the king be 
driven, as the Stuart was, upon illegal forced 



REACTION 115 



benevolences? The law, replied Bismarck, 
was silent; and silence let prerogative in by 
this postern-gate. 

The new Strafford outwitted the Commons. 
Twice a Liberal majority was returned, the 
second larger than the first. Twice it threw out 
the military estimates ; for on the principles of 
Liberalism a standing army was a menace to 
freedom, and the militia should be sufficient for 
home defence. Count Bismarck simply took 
the King's pleasure, and during the next four 
years raised the revenue wanted, dispensing 
with consent of the Lower House. Prussia 
had found its master; Germany would be 
made ere long to submit by force of pre- 
arranged victories; and Europe entered on 
the Bismarckian Era. . . . 

Let us, now we have reached this turning- 
point, endeavour to get a fresh and distinct 
view from it of past and present. I conceive 
it thus. From the rise of Bonaparte to the 
Great War is one hundred and twenty years, 
1794-1914. That period falls into five stages, 
each dominated by a single name: to wit, 
Napoleon, Metternich, Louis Napoleon, Bis- 
marck, and William II, German Emperor. 
No English soldier or politician, not even Wel- 
lington or Disraeli, can be set on a level as 



116 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

regards European influence with one of these. 
It is true that England fought Napoleon to 
his downfall. We hope, with increasing prob- 
ability, that we shall do the like to Kaiser 
Wilhelm. But so long as the balance of the 
Continent hung fairly even, this country was 
a spectator of events rather than active in them. 
Our wars with France down to 1815 went on 
no theory of freedom or serfdom: they were 
directed against a supremacy which threatened 
our independence ; but in the course of defend- 
ing themselves Britons became the champions 
of Europe, which might otherwise have been 
transformed for ages into a French Empire. 
So it was that Burke, the foremost of Whigs in 
his American period, carried the nation with 
him as a Conservative and a good European 
after 1798. He did not love autocracy: but he 
would use it to put down the Jacobins. He la- 
mented the fate of Poland while delighting in 
the support given by the three partitioning 
Powers to the Royal House of France. De- 
mocracy furnished a motive chiefly to reaction. 
The successive English ministries that refused 
to make peace with Napoleon were, assuredly, 
not of a Liberal colour. Castlereagh and 
Wellington were Irish Tories, ascendancy 
men: in Prussia they would have marshalled 



REACTION 117 



the Junkers to withstand innovation. But 
they overthrew the Great Despot, although 
loyal to the person and pretensions of 
George III. 

This, I consider, was due to the "Custom 
of England." That "Custom" had availed, 
one century after another, to restrain Charles 
V and Philip II, Louis XIV and Louis XV. 
It made of these Islands a reserve of freedom 
which could be drawn upon in Europe's ex- 
tremity, yet with no pomp of crusade or 
preaching of first principles. Therefore to 
the Continent in peril of slavery it appears 
like a cold calculating egoism; though in their 
heart of hearts all Western peoples know that 
Britain stands up foursquare, "a tower in the 
deep," it was finely said, the last refuge of 
Old- World liberties, and impregnable. There 
are noble sentiments — nay, convictions — ex- 
pressed with force and dignity in Pitt's 
harangues on French affairs to the House 
of Commons; but after Louis XVI was 
executed, says Carlyle, with grim humour, 
"England has cast out the embassy; England 
declares war, being shocked principally, it 
would seem, at the condition of the river 
Scheldt." Something not entirely unlike this 
happened in 1914u 



118 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

As late as Saturday, August 1, of that 
fatidical year, the English Cabinet, being 
urged by the President of the French Re- 
public to come to the help of France, which 
the Germans were on the point of invading, 
answered: "We will take counsel on the 
matter." They were still considering of it 
when news arrived that the Kaiser's troops 
had crossed the Belgian frontier. Antwerp 
was threatened once more, and an ultimatum 
flew over the wires to Berlin. Our argu- 
ment was sound, our obligation certain, and 
we were obeying our conscience; but those 
who talked of British egoism had been given 
a colourable pretext. John Bull does not 
study appearances much where foreigners are 
concerned. It may be a fine carelessness, 
but it is bad policy. 

To continue our retrospect. Napoleon 
subdued the Continent; he went through 
to the ends of it, he "took spoils of many 
nations, insomuch that the earth was quiet 
before him." Yet still Britain held out; 
sea-power secured empire, and the house- 
breaker of Europe was sent on a British boat 
to St. Helena. Then our Wellingtons and 
Castlereaghs, as though their task was done, 
suffered the autocrats whom thev had saved 



REACTION 119 

to cut up the whole of Europe with dynastic 
carving-knives, on the old royal plan, having 
no regard to race, nationality, religion, or 
civilisation. Poland was already a geographi- 
cal term; Italy became one. Countries like 
Belgium and Holland, Norway and Sweden, 
were bound together as if Siamese twins. 
Catholics and Lutherans pulled different ways 
under a common yoke in the new-made 
Kingdom of Prussia. Nothing was of im- 
portance except the crowned heads which had 
not fallen on the scaffold with Louis XVI. 
Thus did the reign of Metternich begin, and 
it lasted thirty-three years. The balance had 
been restored among sovereigns. No Euro- 
pean war broke the outward-seeming peace un- 
til 1854. But there were unrest, misery and, 
as 1848 proved, an irresistible need of democ- 
racy among the peoples. France a second 
time proclaimed the Republic, and a second 
time was betrayed into accepting an Empire. 
The short, calamitous era of Napoleon the 
Little followed. 

England, so far as my reading allows me to 
form an opinion, construed her interests and 
her duties all this while, and so late as the 
reign of Edward VII, by a standard which 
was not European. She thought from first 



120 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

to last of her Asiatic Empire as the pivot on 
which her policy must turn. It seems a strange 
thing that India should govern Westminster; 
but how else can we explain the aloofness 
of our statesmen during this period from all 
Western problems except the Italian? And 
their conduct towards Italy was dictated by 
feeling, generous indeed, yet without prompt- 
ing them to look round for a connected 
scheme of the inevitable consequences. I note 
a curious parallel. As when the Corn Laws 
were abolished and British agriculture de- 
cayed, England's vital centre of gravity was 
transferred from home to markets oversea, 
in like manner did our possessions and, in 
time, our colonies, divert the political centre 
outside of Europe. 

The Crimean War will furnish a vivid illus- 
tration. Turkey had never been reckoned 
an integral part of the Balance of Power, 
though admitted to the Congress of Vienna. 
But her "integrity and independence" were 
thought necessary to the Asiatic equili- 
brium; and it was for the sake of India 
that we joined Louis Napoleon in making 
war on Russia. That was the true un- 
spoken reason why in 1853, as afterwards in 
1878, we were declaring, by protocol or by 



REACTION 121 



music-hall song, "the Russians shall not have 
Constantinople." 

At great length, in a style of architectural 
splendour, A. W. Kinglake has unrolled 
before us the motives, causes, and con- 
ditions out of which the Crimean War sprang. 
But in those nine volumes he forgets to 
mention India. Nevertheless, in Eothen the 
brilliant man of letters, the traveller in the 
East, perceives England "leaning over to 
clasp" that beloved high- jewelled Empire, 
and certain one day to plant a firm foot on 
Egyptian soil. The Mediterranean was our 
path to Asia, seen in vision before the Suez 
Canal was made; and Egypt is now the 
nerve-centre of our existence as the greatest 
Imperial Power. We could not stand by 
with folded arms while the Tsar was coming 
down on Stamboul; for the Russian instead 
of the Turk in that place meant a complete 
revolution affecting Western Asia. Hence, 
though never touched upon, the danger to 
ourselves, and not the independence of Tur- 
key, was the momentum which decided our 
action. Granting so much, the Crimean War 
has a justification otherwise wholly wanting, 
and nowhere in Kinglake's volumes sup- 
plied. Apart from this, it remains what Count 



122 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

Nesselrode called it, "the most unintelligible 
war" ever known. 

Napoleon III was a hybrid, at once liberal 
by temper and absolute by destiny. There- 
fore he came to grief. It could not have 
fallen out otherwise. The German dreamer, 
Italian carbonaro, exile in London and New 
Fork, incapable revolutionary, acquainted with 
prisons, instrument and accomplice of a gang 
of sharpers — whose air and bearing exposed 
him to invidious comparisons with undoubted 
Bonapartes, like Count Walewski and the 
younger Prince Jerome — deserves our pity, 
but will more probably encounter the scorn of 
future historians. Victor Hugo took a serio- 
comic delight in painting him as a monstrous 
birth of time. He seems to me rather the 
pale Homeric spectre of his great prede- 
cessor, wandering round the places where he 
triumphed, but now bloodless and ineffective. 
There was nothing consecutive in his ideas. 

It was not he that made Italy, but Mazzini, 
Gioberti, Cavour, Orsini, Garibaldi. The 
limitation of his political genius, of which 
Count Bismarck took the measure during his 
various sojourns at Paris, may be judged by 
two samples: he was eager to recognize the 
Southern Confederacy, thereby breaking up 



REACTION 123 



the United States which France had so power- 
fully aided in their beginning; and he violated 
the Monroe Doctrine by invading Mexico, 
which he would never have been allowed to 
retain. That expedition puffed his legend 
away at the cannon's mouth; and when 
Maximilian was shot at Queretaro the second 
French Empire took its deadly wound. 
Neither as Liberal nor as despot did this 
revenant from an epoch of violence and glory 
win renown. But the stroke of some fairy's 
wand threw an illusion about him. For 
twenty years he was the ostensible leader 
of Europe. And he led his own nation to 
Sedan; while his defeat brought the Prussians 
to Paris, and enabled them to proclaim the 
German Empire in the storied chambers of 
Louis XIV at Versailles. 

Bismarck was of another type in stature, 
intellect, and character, as outwardly and 
inwardly strong as Louis Napoleon was feeble. 
By temperament no less than by kinship he 
belonged to the ruling caste. The name is 
found in Brandenburg as far back as the 
thirteenth century. He lived among those 
heavy unsmiling Pomeranians that serve the 
War-machine so well, without intelligence and 
therefore without question. In his earlier 



124 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

years some tendency towards Liberal notions 
was discernible; much, however, could not 
have come of it; and we may fancy the 
youthful Bismarck a companion perhaps of 
Hyde, afterwards Lord Clarendon, but a 
democrat never. 

He passed out of this callow stage, by 
conversion under the influence of Pietism, 
to the camp of the German-Christian, High 
Prussian, monarchy men. This view — a sort 
of Romanticism adapted to royalty, and con- 
spicuous in the present Kaiser's deliberate 
and spectacular exhibitions of himself — would 
have suggested, as it did to a not inconsider- 
able number of Germans, an alliance on the 
most intimate terms between Berlin and 
Vienna. For a little while Bismarck shared 
the amiable delusion. His residence at Frank- 
fort and a better knowledge of the Austrian 
diplomacy put it to flight. Prussia, to the 
Hofburg, was still an upstart, a pretender to 
be kept in its place and used for ends not 
its own. 

Surveying the confused situation with a 
master's eye, and judging it with a conscience 
which was devoted not so much to the person 
of the King as to the House of Hohenzollern, 
this coming dictator of a policy imposed on 



REACTION 125 



king and country alike shaped his resolutions 
boldly, and never went back from them. The 
German Bund must be dissolved, Austria shut 
out and compelled to follow the "Drang nach 
Osten," or Eastern drive, implied in its very 
name; and the Elbe Duchies must fall to 
Brandenburg directly, if no other way could 
be devised, in order that Prussia might pos- 
sess a longer sea-coast and build an efficient 
navy. The Kiel Canal, uniting the Baltic 
and the German Ocean, had its place in his 
designs. We cannot but admire so lucid a 
prevision of the future. That it would cost a 
war between Hohenzollern and Habsburg was 
fully taken into account. The scheme, let us 
remark in passing, was German, but not Pan- 
German. It aimed at excluding, not absorb- 
ing, Catholic Austria. The Prussian Empire, 
whenever it came about, was to be the greatest 
of Protestant Powers. 

In such determined fashion did Bismarck, 
governing without a Budget, disliked by 
Queen Augusta and the Court, more trusted 
than liked by dull King William, take in hand 
the problem of Central Europe. If it were 
still permitted to show by antithesis how the 
personages of history differ, we might attempt 
a contrast in colours between Bismarck and 



126 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

Metternich, to whose authority he succeeded 
on the Continent, but whose measures he 
reversed to the profit of Berlin. Suffice it 
that Metternich had the lightness and bright- 
ness of the most captivating Austrian society 
among his gifts ; that he was fond of pleasure, 
wheedling and cajoling his adversaries; and 
though unsparing of torture, mental and 
physical, for those who would not submit to 
his absolute sway, he has left a more genial 
impression than so pitiless a statecraft deserves 
to make. He was, too, something of a 
believer in the Christian Monarchy all along, 
though probably at heart a sceptic. He 
defeated Napoleon by intrigue as Wellington 
defeated him in the field. And he renewed 
Austria's hold on Germany, while saving her 
non- German territories from partition. 

Bismarck had none of the graces, and could 
afford to dispense with all of them. My 
brilliant, much-daring friend, Richard Dehan, 
describes the "man of iron" as "huge, loud, 
voracious, powerful, tempestuously jovial or 
ironically grim." It was "impossible to 
despise the finished picture, because the man 
was so much a man." His native energy 
was inexhaustible, his will not unequal to it. 
He showed in his domestic relations deep 



REACTION 127 



and even tender feelings. With a Teutonic 
bluntness and ill-humour he combined a 
powerful Cromwellian cast of public speak- 
ing, original and indomitable; to which he 
added the calculated falseness of an "honest 
broker," who embroils parties while under- 
taking to reconcile them, and in every treaty 
which he concludes leaves a loophole whereby 
to slip out of it. His system of double insur- 
ance became famous when the Triple Alliance, 
formed to balance the Franco-Russian entente:, 
was found to have been complicated by an 
understanding with Petersburg itself. He 
once stood for a combination with Napoleon 
III, which would not have been allowed to 
cross a line of his own plans. That he 
detested England was due in part to his loath- 
ing of democracy as we practise it; but also 
to the impossibility of drawing us into a treaty 
beyond revision or rejection by Parliament. 

For monarchs and royal houses other than 
the Prussian his respect was scanty indeed. 
No remorse withheld him from deposing the 
King of Hanover and various German princes, 
beaten in the War of 1866. The alliance with 
Italy against the Emperor Francis Joseph 
was highly repugnant to King William; but 
such considerations did not affect the Minister 



128 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

who, as a man of rare individuality and infinite 
daring, knew himself to be more than a match 
for all the European royalties put together. 
The Pagan priest venerates his idol in its 
shrine; but his daily service of it would lead 
him to agree with the Hebrew psalmist, whose 
estimate of its faculties, we know, was not 
flattering. And thus in Bismarck's alternate 
driving and coaxing of William the Great to 
play his part, and let greatness be thrust upon 
him, we may detect the supreme irony which 
is not absent from human affairs. 

For this man, however, the hour of good 
fortune had struck. He was in the rare 
position of genius when it finds a capitalist 
with millions to execute its designs. During 
seven-and-twenty years the Count and Prince 
acted as Mayor of the Palace, managing "the 
King my Master" like a huge, awkward 
specimen of blind power. To compare Bis- 
marck with Richelieu is natural; but he was, 
in effect, the Napoleon of Reaction, undoing 
by war and peace the work which France in 
its Revolution had accomplished. His suc- 
cessor, Von Biilow, describes him truly as 
"the exact opposite of a leader of progress." 

We may apply to him what Treitschke has 
written of Frederick the Great, who set for 



REACTION 129 



Bismarck a pattern and a policy: "The main- 
spring in this potent nature was the ruthless 
and terror-striking directness of the German. 
Frederick gives himself as he is, and sees 
things as they are. In the long row of his 
letters and writings there is not one line in 
which he endeavours to extenuate his deeds, 
or to adorn his own picture for posterity." 
Whether we should term this "royal frank- 
ness" or the arrogance of a successful Jack 
Sheppard, may be left undecided. In both 
cases we do know from the men themselves 
what were the motives which inspired their 
conduct. Each held the maxim, stated long 
before by the Florentine who taught Realism 
in politics, "If there is anything to gain by 
being honest, let us be honest; if it is neces- 
sary to deceive, let us deceive." 

Bismarck's attitude towards Austria, which 
he used and despised, was that of Frederick, 
with a difference not of sentiment but of 
action, for which the time had come. "Since 
the predictions of the astrologers," says Von 
Treitschke, "at the court of the Great Elector, 
there always floated about the Hohenzollerns 
a vague presentiment that they were marked 
out to bear the sword and sceptre of the Holy 
Roman Empire." That Empire had gone to 



130 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

the tomb of all the Capulets; and the oecume- 
nical or world-significance of Pan-Germanism 
had not dawned upon Bismarck, whose ambi- 
tion did not travel beyond the horizon. But 
he well knew the importance of supplanting 
Austria by seizing on the leadership of Ger- 
many; and he meant his King to have it. 

Bismarck desired not the "holiness" nor the 
"Roman" character (which signified interfer- 
ence in Italy) of the old medieval concep- 
tion. He pursued what Treitschke terms "a 
purely secular statecraft in the ideas of the 
Reformation," or "an alliance of temporal 
princes under Prussia's governing influence." 
And it is true to say that "what was left of 
the old Germanic community," which during 
the eighteenth century had been decaying 
more and more, now in the year 1862 "scarcely 
preserved the semblance of life." Austria was 
merely conservative; Prussia was aggressive; 
and the aggressor won. 

The question of Schleswig-Holstein, of 
which the very name, like " Jarndyce and Jarn- 
dyce" in Chancery, emptied the drawing-rooms 
of diplomatists, brought the new statesmanship 
into dazzling light. Bismarck's 'prentice hand 
executed a master stroke, so bold, fortunate, 
and Machiavellian, that not the Frederick 



REACTION 131 



of the Prussian Morning Talks could have 
beaten him. This was the first Silesian War 
imitated and equalled, on the coast of the 
Northern and Baltic waters, which henceforth 
should belong to Brandenburg. We must 
consider it a little. 

Take no fright, my benevolent British com- 
panion in study, as if I were going down 
myself and carrying you with me into the 
deeps of another family litigation between 
royal and quasi-royal Houses, the Danish, 
Prussian, Augustenburg, with constitutional 
questions thrown in. Not at all. The matter 
is simplicity itself. In 1864 Prussia had just 
as much right to Sleswick (so we used to spell 
the word, not without significance) or to Hol- 
stein as you and I have on this April Monday 
morning when I am inditing these sentences. 
The King of Denmark, Christian IX, other- 
wise termed the Pro ' ] King, who succeeded 
to the throne in November, 1863, had his 
claims. The Augustenburgs, partly owing to 
Bismarck's diplomacy some years earlier, had 
renounced theirs, but broke the engagement 
when Frederick VII died. The people, mixed 
German and non-German, would be thought 
to have claims also by Liberal Europe. One 
thing was undeniable: Prussia could not put 



132 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

in her demand, not even by Mitbelehnung or 
Erbverbruderung, to a yard of land in either 
duchy. 

But what was that to Count Bismarck? 
He wanted a seaboard for his royal master; 
he could get it by force and hold it by 
chicanery. He did so. "From the begin- 
ning," he wrote in his Reminiscences long 
afterwards, "I kept annexation steadily before 
my eyes." And Germany cried "Hoch" with 
trembling. For as the Duchies fared to-day 
so might other lands lying conveniently near 
the Prussian borders fare to-morrow. 

In the art of political chess few problems 
have been more neatly resolved. It appeared 
in law to be desperately intricate, refusing to 
yield up its tangle at the bidding of all the 
Powers combined. Then Bismarck opened 
with a gambit of the German Bund which 
delegated Austria ana x russia to act on its 
behalf. They acted by powder and shot; the 
Danes fought well, but were defeated; and 
on August 1, 1864, Schleswig-Holstein and 
Lauenburg were ceded by the Treaty of 
Vienna to what some one has called the "high 
marauding parties." 

Now Bismarck proceeded to checkmate 






REACTION 133 



Austria. He had in the campaign for the 
Duchies found a pretext to invade Den- 
mark — the crossing of the frontier by a few 
Prussian hussars. He never dreamt of observ- 
ing a treaty beyond the moment when he 
could turn it to advantage. This doctrine 
has been summed up in the slippery diplomatic 
phrase, "Rebus sic stantibus" ("While the 
situation lasts"), and later still in words 
spoken by the German Chancellor, Bethmann 
Hollweg, to Sir Edward Goschen, our then 
ambassador at Berlin, touching a "scrap of pa- 
per." Bismarck manoeuvred in the question of 
annexing the Duchies for his biggest prize, 
the absolute control of the Fatherland by 
shutting out the Habsburgs. They on their 
part clung with both hands to a falling dig- 
nity. At charming Gastein, in the Salzburg 
region, August 25, 1865, an ostensible agree- 
ment "papered over the cracks," which were 
yawning into "rents of ruin" for the old 
Imperial Power. It was only a truce, and 
Bismarck saw to it that the Prussian army 
should be brought, in weapons, discipline, and 
numbers, to the highest pitch. Men of supreme 
ability were at his disposal, Von Roon to 
organise, Von Moltke to plan and execute 



134 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

the inevitable campaign. The Duchies were 
lost for ever to their lawful owners, whoever 
these might be. 

There is a passage in Froude's History of 
England (vol. i, p. 480) which, when I read it 
in our College library in Rome, just before 
1870, struck me as profoundly true and writ- 
ten with fine feeling. I transcribe it. Froude 
observes, "Where changes are about to take 
place of great and enduring moment, a kind 
of prologue, on a small scale, sometimes antici- 
pates the true opening of the drama; like the 
first drops which give notice of the coming 
storm, or as if the shadows of the reality were 
projected forwards into the future, and imi- 
tated in dumb show the movements of the real 
actors in the story." 

Such a prologue was the episode of the Elbe 
Duchies. Their deliberate seizure in defiance 
of right, and of agreements to which Prussia 
had set her seal; the cunning with which Bis- 
marck persuaded his intended victim, Austria, 
to snatch a prey that he meant to take from 
her ; the small but effective devices that enabled 
him to overcome the conscience of his king; 
the justification offered carelessly that treaties 
not backed with force do not really count; the 
aim disclosed when it was likely to be attained 



REACTION 135 



that Prussia wanted a war station at Kiel, and 
|must get it by hook or by crook; and, finally, 
the stepping-stone made of one triumph to 
lead up to a second and a greater — all these 
incidents relate in dumb show the story of a 
drama which, beginning on the European scale 
in 1866, by the Seven Weeks War, then 
enveloping the French Empire in disaster and 
bringing on the Third Republic in 1870, has 
now taken the whole world for a stage and 
the world-power or the ruin of Germany for 
a theme. We have seen the prologue; we 
are acting in the play. 

Yet another reflection — partly mine, but 
derived from a view which I find admirably 
wrought out by Kinglake in his second volume 
(p. 142), describing "the great island-Power," 
meaning Britain, as "the one which, by the 
well-informed statesmen of the Continent, is 
looked to as the surest safeguard against 
wrong. Europe leans," he says, "Europe rests 
on this faith." And he continues in sentences 
like the following — 

"So the moment it is made to appear that 
for any reason England is disposed to abdi- 
cate, or to suspend for a while the performance 
of her European duties, that moment the 
wrong-doer sees his opportunity and begins to 



136 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

stir. . . . Monarchs find that to conspire for 
gain of territory, or to have other princes con- 
spiring against them, is the alternative pre- 
sented to their choice. The system of Europe 
becomes decomposed, and war follows. There- 
fore, exactly in proportion as England values 
the peace of Europe, she ought to abstain 
from every word and from every sign which 
tends to give the wrong-doer a hope of her 
acquiescence." 

Since the troubles between the German 
Diet and the Danish King had begun, our 
Ministers (to allow them the credit which they 
deserve) were sensible of Prussia's designs on 
the Duchies; and Palmerston, Russell, and 
Disraeli knew well that danger to Britain's 
naval supremacy would follow if those designs 
succeeded. To preserve the integrity of 
Denmark, while reconciling by diplomacy the 
various conflicting parties, appeared to the 
English Cabinet wise and just. But they had 
to reckon with the Prince Consort, whose view 
of England never ceased to be that of a 
German in outlook and sympathy. We learn 
from the correspondence of Queen Victoria 
that the Cabinet favoured one line of policy, 
such I have sketched, and the Court favoured 
another out of regard for Germany, but as 



REACTION 137 



events proved, wholly to the advantage of 
Berlin. The Prince Consort, we must not 
forget, was by the nature of his position per- 
manent Foreign Minister. To his principles 
the Queen adhered as to a law. 

Palmerston wrote to Lord John Russell, 
June 23, 1850, "Is not the Queen requiring 
that I should be Minister, not indeed for 
Austria, Russia, or France, but for the Ger- 
manic Confederation?" These words, laid 
before her Majesty, brought a sharp answer 
dictated, no doubt, by Prince Albert, whom 
they seem to arraign. In the same year 
Queen Victoria tells her uncle, the King of 
the Belgians, "It is a mistake to think the 
supremacy of Prussia is what is wished for." 
Certainly the Prince Consort did not wish for 
it. He belonged to a minor ruling House; 
and his philosophy would be, to use an apt 
German expression, Meinstadtisch, or as we 
say, provincial. But he was not likely to feel, 
as Englishmen do, the truth and greatness 
of Milton's or of Kinglake's contention that 
this "island-power" is the home of freedom 
and the judgment-seat of European equity. 
His best-known declaration, that "constitu- 
tional government is on its trial," may be 
construed without injustice to the effect that 



138 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

a return of autocracy is always possible, and 
perhaps would turn out to be a very good 
thing. I cannot praise that language. It has 
happily not taken root in the British Empire. 

But Queen Victoria, who was a great consti- 
tutional sovereign, and also "a very woman," 
allowed the Prince's view to decide her action 
as regarded the Elbe Duchies from first to last. 
At no time would she consent to maintain "the 
integrity of the Danish Monarchy." On May 1, 
1858, she wrote to Lord Malmesbury that she 
could not sanction a proposal tending in any 
such direction, "a false step on our part may 
produce a war between France and Germany." 
In this reason alleged, unless Germany meant 
Prussia — which the Queen elsewhere describes 
as "the only large and powerful really German 
Power" — it meant a negligible quantity. 

Sir Theodore Martin, the editor of the 
Queen's Letters, bids us note that "The 
Queen and Prince considered that the atti- 
tude of the British Government was un- 
necessarily pro-Danish." In 1864, according 
to Baron Beust, "Queen Victoria personally 
intervened to prevent British action in favour 
of Denmark." Was there a diplomatist living 
in that year who believed that when Prussia 
and Austria were victorious the Duchies would 



REACTION 139 



become little sovereign States like Sachsen- 
Coburg or Sachsen- Weimar? And if not, who 
was the "tertius gaudens," the fox that would 
run away with the pheasant? It is rather sad 
to look back on England's abdication in those 
days of her duty towards Europe. I remem- 
ber as a boy reading the debate in the House 
of Commons on intervention to save Denmark, 
and I admired Disraeli's wisdom. To no pur- 
pose did he plead. The prologue to the great 
drama ran its course. Henceforth Count 
Bismarck might be sure that England would 
watch his career as a disinterested looker-on 
in the stalls. She might talk loud; she would 
do nothing, so long as Queen Victoria lived, 
to thwart his ambition. 



CHAPTER VII 



Austria, Rome, and France — the Crisis of 
the Century 

HOLDING with Clausewitz, though not 
having learnt it from him, that war 
and peace should be parts of one consistent 
state-policy, Count Bismarck, in 1866, re- 
sembled an artist who was beginning to paint, 
on a canvas carefully prepared, a great pic- 
ture, the design of which was already clear to 
his imagination. He would seize occasion by 
the forelock; but he had no need to improvise 
a plan. The Bismarckian scheme was coherent, 
and proved its adaptation to the world of things 
as they are by its success. To isolate Austria, 
then to fall upon her, and in the stricken field 
to wrest from the Habsburgs their place in 
German rule, was the immediate object. 

Bismarck did all that in him lay to avoid 
meeting a world in arms. He recognised that 
if he went to war, he must, before declaring 
it, secure the Prussian fronts on east and west. 
He did not require to be told that Frederick the 

140 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 141 

Great earned his peculiar glory not by winning 
the Seven Years War, but by not losing it; 
and that its termination might have been 
Prussia's downfall, had not a demented Tsar 
Peter in 1762 recalled his troops which were 
attacking the Hohenzollern, and so withdrawn 
Russia from the number of his enemies. Since 
then, no Prussian sovereign had broken the 
long peace with his tremendous neighbour. 
In Bismarck's philosophy to keep that peace 
intact was a first principle. 

Accordingly, when the ill-advised Polish 
Rebellion surged up in 1863, the authorities of 
Prussia, civil and military, gave every possible 
assistance to the Tsar's troops, short of joining 
them to put down the rising by force. Next 
year it was the turn of Russia to show its 
benevolent neutrality by letting things take 
their course in the Danish war. The Slav 
Power would now be quiescent when Austria 
looked round for help. Bismarck had gone 
as ambassador to Petersburg in earlier years. 
He cultivated the Imperial family, made many 
friends, learnt to speak a little of the beautiful 
and difficult Russian language, and registered 
a vow that he would never bring the Cossack 
on his shoulders if he could help it. Peace, 
then, with Russia was a foregone conclusion. 



142 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

It lasted down to August 1, 1914; and when 
the German ambassador presented his mas- 
ter's ultimatum to M. Sazonov, he almost 
fainted with horror. Well he might, for it 
was taking up the sheet-anchor of Bismarck's, 
nay of Frederick's policy, and casting it into 
fathomless deeps. 

Safe on the Eastern front, Bismarck turned 
to the Western. In October, 1865, his fate- 
ful conversations with Napoleon III took 
place at Biarritz. The French Empire was 
sickening unto death. It could not demand 
aid or service from a single ally; not so much 
as from Italy which it had helped to make a 
free nation. On strained terms with England 
since the annexation of Nice and Savoy, the 
Emperor kept out of the imbroglio thanks to 
which the Elbe Duchies passed into Prussian 
hands. His attitude towards Poland estranged 
the Tsar; but there was no force behind it, 
and the insurgents had been left to their 
fate. Louis Bonaparte found himself called 
upon at Biarritz to decide whether he would 
take up arms against Austria for a fixed price, 
or against Prussia with uncertain chances of 
booty, or against neither. He stood irresolute 
while Bismarck wrapped him round skillfully 
in a net of delusion, with talk about compen- 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 143 

sations and possibilities. The heavy-winged 
bird was caught. And on April 8, 1866, Italy 
engaged herself to attack Austria so soon as 
war was inevitable. Venetia was to be her 
reward. 

Of the millions who were now to fight and 
suffer in realising Bismarck's ambition, no 
thought entered these controlling minds except 
as yielding money, strength, and life on the 
principle "sic vos non vobis," when required 
so to do. Here is a consideration worth 
our regard. In the year 1861 Alexander II 
emancipated the Russian peasants; and in 
the same year Abraham Lincoln was com- 
pelled to accept the war against the Con- 
federate States, which ended in the abolition 
of negro slavery. But in 1866 absolute power 
reigned from the Bay of Biscay to the Yellow 
Sea. Three vast autocracies covered all that 
space, and the populations toiled submissively 
for masters who looked on them as mere 
capital in the gamble of politics. Mankind 
moves very slowly. Nevertheless, a double 
emancipation, in the Old World and the New, 
had in it some promise and potency. 

Austria, then, "the meeting-place of Teuton 
and Slav," was to be taken by the throat and 
pitched headlong out of Germany, with a rude 



144 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

i , —n 

parting injunction, "Henceforth mind your 
own business, and look down the Danube 
towards Belgrade. Stand sentinel against 
Russia; keep the key of Constantinople in 
Vienna. Lebewohl!" We have been amazed 
since 1914 at the way in which the Kaiser- 
lichs get beaten and the quantity of thrashings 
which all these peoples, individually brave 
enough, can absorb. The Empire seems always 
on the point of breaking up, yet has never 
been broken; it may be ramshackle, but is 
remarkably elastic, and advance has followed 
on recoil as it were by law. Hence the saying, 
attributed to Palacky, the historian of the 
Czechs, "Did Austria not exist we should have 
to invent it," which the Hungarian patriot 
Pauly allowed to be sound history. 

What is the inner meaning of this curious 
fact? It is that Teuton and Slav have 
"met," but never amalgamated; and that 
the Southern Slavs, divided geographically 
and forming a fringe round a nucleus of 
Germans on the Upper Danube and Mag- 
yars on the middle of that stream, are held 
in this double chain, but ever straining at it. 
Their rivalries, complicated with a struggle 
going on at all times between Vienna and 
Buda-Pest, make it impossible that the K.K. 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 145 

Army (Kaiserlich-Koniglich is the label on 
everything in Austria) should be welded 
into a united host. The two-headed eagle 
has, in consequence, lost half his feathers 
and become a laughing-stock to the other 
three Imperial fowl of heaven, the Russian, 
Prussian, and French, to say nothing of 
the Polish still biding his time. But the 
Habsburgs were taught by Rome, which long 
recognised them as emperors, and even now 
venerates the shadow of the name, how to 
recover from defeat and to hold out by delay. 
The House of Austria survives in virtue of 
a great principle which science calls inertia. 
Will it survive much longer? And is it, as 
Dr. Emil Reich argued, a necessary evil? It 
saw the rise of Prussia ; who knows but it may 
look on at its fall ? 

I am not praying for the Hofburg, which 
is autocracy entrenched in pride and legalism, 
with a gold-aristocracy just outside its gates. 
But there is a proverb about threatened men. 
Bismarck, whose regulated aims were proofs 
of genius and his wars "deliberate lightning," 
knew to a pace how far he was going when 
he sent the armies of Prussia, irresistible, but 
never out of hand, over the Saxon frontier. 
The French Emperor anticipated a long war, 



146 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

exhausted combatants, and his own interven- 
tion, as the peace-compelling Jove. Such was 
neither Bismarck's plan nor the outcome. In 
eighteen days, June 15 to July 3, 1866, the 
campaign was begun and ended in Bohemia. 
The battle which in Western telegrams was 
called Sadowa, fought on the last-mentioned 
date, finished the Austrian leadership of Ger- 
mans and shattered Napoleon's hopes. On 
August 23, at Nickolsburg, that leadership 
was transferred to Berlin. The new Germany 
was divided, by way of propitiating France, 
into Confederations north and south of the 
Main, but by force of events both came under 
Bismarck's disposal. Prussia henceforth might 
claim to be the centre and decisive element in 
the Balance of Power. 

England looked on from afar, busy with 
reform of Parliament and with the palings of 
Hyde Park, which I saw thrown down in 
the summer weather on July 23, 1866, by a 
surging crowd. Europe and its affairs did 
not concern her. Was France likely to be 
menaced? Suppose it, what then? We were 
under no obligation to protect France. The 
Queen's unalterable German sympathies now 
became of necessity sympathies with Berlin. 
Her eldest daughter was married to the Prince 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 147 

Royal of Prussia; their son William, born in 
1859, could not fail, if he outlived his father, 
to be King; and whatever else the art of 
Count Bismarck should bring of honour and 
dignity to the House of Brandenburg would 
be his. Sympathy went with family alliance; 
nor did it seem that the interests of Great 
Britain would suffer. 

Having won his second game of political 
chess and swiftly checkmated the Emperor- 
King, it was now incumbent on Bismarck to 
defeat the House of Bonaparte ; for Napoleon 
could not give up the position of supremacy 
in European affairs, hitherto held by France, 
without losing his throne and ruining his 
dynasty. Bewildered, hesitating, and stricken 
by disease, the miserable victim of ambition 
and pleasure, of whom all the ablest advisers 
were dead, went knocking for assistance at 
doors which would scarcely open to him. 

He made advances to Italy by the Con- 
vention which withdrew his army of occupa- 
tion from Rome. But Italy, glorying in 
her acquisition of Venetia, had no desire 
to throw away the Prussian friendship with- 
out which never could she have torn it 
from the grasp of Austria. He dreamt of 
playing once more the traditional French 



148 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

hand, by defending the South Germans from 
further encroachments of the Hohenzollern. 
It was a well-known manoeuvre, and had it 
been attempted before Sadowa it might have 
succeeded, with an efficient French army to 
carry it through. Now it was too late. Bis- 
marck had entered into treaties offensive and 
defensive with those very States when peace 
was signed. By virtue of them, should war 
break out, the King of Prussia became com- 
mander-in-chief of all the German forces. 
When Thiers lifted his shrill voice for some- 
thing which meant an attack on the Rhine, in 
March, 1867, these engagements, secret until 
then, were published as a warning from the 
new Germany of what aggression might 
expect. 

Napoleon also wanted Luxemburg; he 
wanted the left bank of the Rhine ; he wanted 
Belgium. The principle of nationalities, for 
which he had gone to war with Austria in 
1859, he now threw to the winds. Bismarck 
drew scorn upon the Imperial hotel-keeper 
who was constantly presenting his bill. Had 
a good German fairy wished to bless the new- 
birth of the Fatherland, here was the luckiest 
gift she could have chosen — an impotent and 
clamorous foe west of the Rhine, threatening 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 149 

■ l "M*— «■■— — i ii — — i— — m. i 

its unity while he cringed before it. The 
people shouted their old song in Napoleon's 
face, "Sie sollen ihn nicht haben, den freien 
Deutschen Rhein" — not he, nor any"Franzos" 
of them all, should annex the national stream. 
By his protests, his claims, his coquetting with 
a Liberal party held for years in bondage, and 
now called up to power, this doomed son of 
misfortune put his shoulder to the Bismarckian 
wheel, and sent it spinning along. 

But he was desperate. His Mexican Em- 
peror fell under the bullets of a native de- 
tachment, and the French troops retired at 
America's bidding. The Convention with 
Italy vanished before Garibaldi's invasion of 
the Papal States; Mentana was won by the 
chassepots of the French; and in the coming 
contest Napoleon would get no help from 
Florence, now the capital of a kingdom that 
looked to possess Rome at the nearest chance. 
Paris, the city of revolutions, had been trans- 
formed by Hausmann from the military point 
of view, so that barricades should be less within 
the people's power, and cannon might enfilade 
the wider streets along their whole course. 
But Paris remained the city of pleasure, cos- 
mopolitan, brilliant by day and by night, and 
increasingly demoralized as the Empire moved 



150 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

to its fall. In 1867 the Exhibition drew 
visitors of all nations and the Russian Tsar to 
a marvellous but sinister show of art, inven- 
tion, and luxury. There was a French writer 
whose fame has grown since his death — Ernest 
Hello — most remarkable of Catholic thinkers 
in a frivolous generation, endowed with a pro- 
phetic sense. And as he wandered through 
these courts and saw the crowds thronging 
them, he asked aloud, "When will the catas- 
trophe come?" It was not far off. 

I quote my own recollections by way of 
lightening this tragic story of the end of an 
age. The number must now be rapidly 
diminishing of those that looked up to the 
Tuileries when it was the home of Empire, 
shining with many lights. So I remember it 
on my first glimpse of Paris, in October 1868. 
A second time, in 1873, I saw its windows; 
but now they were gaping apertures, the 
Commune had done its work on them. And, 
later still, I was walking with M. TAbbe 
Dimnet, well known since to English readers, 
and Auguste Angellier, the illustrious poet, 
over the very site made into a garden where 
this ill-omened palace had stood. But in 1868 
I was on my journey as a young student to 
Home ; and the duty of getting a visa for my 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 151 

passport took me to the Nunziatura in the 
Rue St.-Dominique. The Nunzio was Monsi- 
gnor, afterwards Cardinal, Chigi, who received 
travellers on such an errand with charming 
Italian courtesy, and he spoke to me a few 
gracious words. Thus in my memories of life 
abroad France and Rome are for ever blended. 
To France and its achievements, heroic or 
delightful, I am a debtor beyond any reckon- 
ing of mine. To Rome, to Italy, what words 
can tell how much I owe, still adding to my 
obligation? The true "Vita Nuova," which 
holds within it religion and culture, which 
kindles light of this world and light of the 
world to come, that is my gain from those 
happy shores. And with Virgil I would 
salute the Mother of our civilisation, the 
teacher of what is best for mankind. 

"Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus, 
Magna virum; tibi res antiquae laudis et artis 
Ingredior, sanctos ausus reeludere fontes." 

It is one thing to read a column about 
"foreign affairs" in the Times while you sit 
comfortably in your London club or the 
public library, another to be living in Rome 
while history is making before your eyes at 
an (Ecumenical Council, and on a day like 



152 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

September 20, 1870. George Eliot has written 
in Middlemarch some meditative lines which 
bring out the difference, yet leave me dis- 
satisfied. She calls Rome "the city of visible 
history," which is finely said and true; adding 
a little way down in her grand manner, "To 
those who have looked at Rome with the 
quickening power of a knowledge which 
breathes a growing soul into all historic 
shapes, and traces out the suppressed transi- 
tions which unite all contrasts, Rome may 
still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of 
the world." This, although likewise true, 
reminds one of the German professor evolving 
out of his own consciousness a zoology that 
might be found alive and decidedly in action 
if he would go for it to its proper habitat. 
Things at Rome do not move "in funeral 
procession"; they are by no means a mere 
"oppressive masquerade of ages." The city 
of dead Caesars is the capital of Christendom. 
The largest numerically, and the most authori- 
tative in fact, of religious communions which 
name themselves after Christ, is Catholic and 
Roman. 

To an English girl, such as Dorothea 
Brooke, with her Puritanism and her "brief 
narrow experience," the Eternal City would 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 153 

offer, as it does still to her kind, a bewildering 
spectacle of old and new, fragments not bound 
up in any scheme she could grasp. But on 
George Eliot's master, Comte, the Church 
centred in Rome exercised an influence that 
shaped his entire view of history. To un- 
happy Byron Rome was "my country, city 
of the soul"; to Newman "it is the first of 
cities, and all I ever saw are but as dust (even 
dear Oxford) compared with its majesty and 
glory"; while it was in the nave of St. Peter's 
itself that there dawned on Gladstone the first 
light of religion as divinely intended to be 
Catholic unity — in other words, a Visible 
Church, one and undivided. 

Almost without design, my book has 
reached its own centre, and it finds us in 
the great climacteric year of the nineteenth 
century, 1870, looking out from the Seven 
Hills on a situation which dominates those 
hundred and twenty years, taken by me as 
constituting the world's last age and closing 
where the War of 1914 opens. Three great 
events mark it in the Kalendar: the Vatican 
Council, the collapse of the French Empire, 
and the fall of the Temporal Power. This 
was a conjunction of human fortunes such as 
we rarely behold. Each event has brought 



154 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

I 

in its train effects, and will bring more, of 
incalculable consequence. 

The Council was a reply to Gallicans, 
Protestants, and unbelievers; it aimed at 
undoing the evils which had forced the 
Congress of Westphalia to recognise a Chris- 
tendom rent into many pieces. But there 
were no political intentions hidden in its 
decrees. The surrender of Napoleon at Sedan 
proved as decisive as the execution of 
Charles I. From 1649 onwards England was 
committed beyond reversal to government by 
responsible Ministers. When the French Em- 
peror gave up his blunt sword to Bismarck, no 
choice was left to France but the Third Re- 
public. And when Rome became the capital 
of Italy, the Spiritual Power, still throned in 
the Vatican, entered upon a phase which is 
one of partial eclipse, but which will, as I 
believe, end in the mighty dawn of a Catholic 
Restoration. 

Rome, then, is an ever-living museum, full 
of "ancestral images and trophies gathered 
from afar." But it is the City of the Nations, 
not of the Tribe. Keep that well in view, my 
Reader, for on it I mean to build a lofty 
argument when I come to my chief concern^ 
the reconciliation of the Church with the 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 155 

People. A museum, therefore, is old Rome, 
but likewise a university not to be paralleled; 
a home of saints and hotbed of diplomacy; a 
place of pilgrimage where you may expect 
to see or hear of every celebrated character 
extant; the refuge of deposed royalties like 
the Bourbons of Naples and Isabella of Spain; 
more cosmopolitan than London or Paris; 
and sure to be in touch with whatever 
great movement is passing over the human 
stage, so far as it can make any difference to 
the Papacy. My own time there as a student 
commenced just a year after the Battle of 
Mentana had made the Vatican Council 
possible by leaving Pius IX master, though 
under French protection, in Rome. It lasted 
until July 1873, when the Kulturkampf was 
at its height. Since those days I have several 
times renewed my fealty at the Apostle's 
Tomb. But now let us briefly sum up the 
leading particulars of what was termed in 
our preceding page the "climacteric" or cul- 
minating year, 1870. 

The Vatican Council ushered itself in with 
an historical procession, December 8, 1869, in 
St. Peter's, of seven hundred and fifty bishops, 
gathered from the four winds. It reminded 
some who were looking on of the opening of the 



156 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

l ■ ■ ■ ! 

States-General at Versailles on May 4, 1789; 
and so far accurately, that men whose fate or 
conduct would influence generations to come 
were moving over the marble pavement to the 
hall of their future debates in the north tran- 
sept. There were those like Antonelli, repre- 
senting an "Interim" the term of which had 
almost run out. There were others like Henry 
Edward Manning, whose see of Westminster 
and his own conversion prophesied of a time 
when England should be once more Catholic. 
There were French bishops with Gallican tra- 
ditions hovering round them, — Dupanloup of 
Orleans, who was to behold his episcopal city 
taken twice by the Bavarians; and Darboy 
of Paris, destined to be shot as a hostage by 
the Commune in the May of 1871, while his 
blood-stained rochet would be preserved as a 
relic in the treasury of Notre Dame. There 
was Mermillod of Geneva with Ledochowski 
of Posen, both to suffer imprisonment and 
exile during the Kulturkampf. There was 
a Cardinal Bonaparte, reminding us by his 
features of the Great Captain, but in every 
other respect singularly not resembling him. 
There was the soldierly "bishop from the 
Turkish frontier," Strossmayer, whose name 
flew speedily from lip to lip during the months 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 157. 

that followed ; and whose life of ninety years 
and labours on behalf of his brethren have 
entitled him to be called "the greatest son 
of Croatia." There was the youngest bishop 
of all, James Gibbons — the only one now 
surviving of those seven hundred and fifty. 
He came from the late Confederate States; 
and he is now Cardinal Archbishop of Balti- 
more, a pledge by his position as well as by 
what he has done, perhaps even to a larger 
extent than Manning, of Catholic expansion 
in centuries yet to be. Last and little re- 
garded, for the Roman world did not know 
him, I point to Joachim Vincent Pecci, Car- 
dinal and Bishop of Perugia. This was to 
be Leo XIII, "Lumen in Cselo," the most 
brilliant of popes since Julius II, more able 
than Sixtus V, not less learned than Benedict 
XIV, who should finish the Kulturkampf by 
compelling Prince Bismarck to go to Canossa. 
And, closing the procession, we saw borne 
along in state the Pontiff himself — Pius IX 
— that much-enduring man of vicissitudes and 
sorrows, who first among modern Popes held 
out his hand to Democracy. He was called 
"Liberal" and "reforming"; and the ex- 
tremes of both ends had proved too strong, 
in a country without recent political training, 



158 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

for the true Father of Italy. But if the 
movement of 1848, which his example set 
going, had failed, he at least could not be 
charged with its failure. Another Pontiff 
might succeed where Pius IX did but suffer 
loss and exile. He was surely, on that day 
of December 1869, the most pathetic figure 
among the rulers of Europe. 

With deliberations in the Council hall I am 
not now concerned. The final voting in private 
session took place on July 13; and the dogma 
of Papal Infallibility waited only for promul- 
gation. Rumours of the diplomatic quarrel 
between France and Germany filled the air. 
A rupture of relations was in sight; when 
would the gage be thrown down? On July 16 
a group of us English students were kneeling 
in front of St. Peter's shrine, where the lamps 
burn like a cluster of golden bees. Suddenly 
the Bishop of Northampton came up and 
whispered to us, "The French have declared 
war, and have crossed the Rhine." They had 
not crossed the Rhine; they would never in 
that war cross it. But the die was cast. On 
July 18 the Council met for its concluding 
act in the crowded Basilica, lightning flashing 
about the dome and thunder pealing overhead. 
The bishops shouted "Placet," and St. Peter's 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 159 

rang like an answering choir. Then Pius IX 
from the Apostolic Chair confirmed and pub- 
lished the decrees. Immense applause broke 
out; men shook hands with one another, 
exclaiming "Credo, credo"; and the vast 
audience of many thousands sang the "Te 
Deum" as with a single mighty voice. 

The scene was unforgettable. Cardinal 
Gibbons has written: "The definition of Papal 
Infallibility did more to rescue the Church 
from the dominion of the State than anything 
in modern history." If that be so, and I agree 
most heartily with my venerable friend (as his 
kindness to me permits me to call him), then 
I say that the moving spectacle of July 18, 
1870, was a long step in advance towards 
realising the ideals of Christian Democracy. 

Next day war was declared from the 
Tuileries. The various pretexts put forth 
on both sides were hollow, and sensible men 
asked Talleyrand's question, "Who is deceived 
here?" It was a battle for the hegemony of 
Europe, or Bismarck's third game of political 
chess. He contrived with singular adroitness 
to put Napoleon in the wrong. Those who 
wish to understand what is the conscience of 
Prussian diplomacy will do well to study, not 
only the record of the Ems telegram, but that 



160 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

of the so-called French proposal to annex Bel- 
gium, which was "palmed" (there is no other 
word for it) with a thimble-rigger's dexterity 
on the innocent, or at least gullible, Benedetti. 
The triumvirate in Berlin — Bismarck, Von 
Boon, Von Moltke — had set their hearts on 
beating the Emperor; and dismemberment 
of France would assuredly follow. But they 
can never have wished that a Republic should 
be set up in Paris. Or did they fancy that 
a South American regime in the neighbouring 
country would help to make Germany secure? 
Who shall say? 

The truth which I perceive like the sun at 
noon is that Bismarck, though he had talked 
with Lassalle, the Jew- Socialist who aspired 
to succeed the Hohenzollerns, and must have 
looked into Das Kapital by Karl Marx, then 
living in a room in Oxford Street, never till 
his dying day understood that he was just 
fighting a rearward action; or that the poet 
Burns with his "A man's a man for a' that," 
which Freiligrath had rendered into sounding 
German, "Trotz alledem," would conquer all 
the kings and chancellors in the better days of 
humanity. Yes, it is so; and I, an old man 
verging on seventy, declare my conviction 
that the great simple truth which shines and 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 161 

sings in Burns, in Shelley — nay, in Victor 
Hugo, and which as regards Les Miserables 
is applied Christian teaching, will prevail. 
"Hsec est spes mea, reposita in sinu meo," 
"This is my hope, laid up in my heart." 

Then began for France the "Terrible Year." 
The "thaw," coming after twenty years of des- 
potism, had ruined the army, undermined the 
nation, and was a bad sign of long, exhausting 
weakness to follow, from the effects of which 
not only France, but Europe, has not yet 
recovered. England, I grieve to say — but 
we were all, as I recollect, in the same con- 
demnation — England was rather self-right- 
eous. France, said Dr. Norman Macleod, 
preaching before Queen Victoria, was suffer- 
ing for its sins. "O Geordie, jingling Geor- 
die! and had the British nation no sins to ex- 
piate?" When the first fortnight after the 
declaration of war was ending, those symp- 
tomatic battles, Weissenburg, Worth, and For- 
bach, told us that the House of Bonaparte 
(which I for one did not admire), and the 
country which had suffered its rule since 1851, 
must pay the penalty of the coup d'etat, what- 
ever sins it had to answer for in addition. 

But I am bound to set on record one fact, 
visible and palpable to us in Rome. The 



162 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

!-■•■- 

Italians were delighted when they heard 
of the German victories. I remember our 
steward, Ser Angelo, a fine face and figure 
worthy of Raphael's pencil, bursting in with 
the news, "By God, Signor, they are beaten!" 
No need to ask who were beaten. It may 
not be unseasonable to recall that Italians 
have long memories; and that from the ex- 
pedition of Charles VIII in 1494 to the 
campaigns of Napoleon they associated the 
appearance of French armies south of the 
Alps with pillage and rapine. I love France; 
but Italy is my second, my spiritual home; 
and I can well understand Ser Angelo. God 
rest him! He is dead these many years. 

France fell like a house of cards. From 
the first defeats until Sedan, which threw the 
Empire, as we now say, on the scrap heap, 
there were but twenty-eight days, all told. 
On Sunday, September 4 — a beautiful clear 
day at Tusculum in the Latin Hills, near 
which we were living at our country house — 
the Republic was proclaimed at the Palais 
Bourbon. It might not have survived a 
week: it has lasted just upon forty-seven 
years — the most enduring of French govern- 
ments since 1789. Its beautiful and appealing 
motto, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," I 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 163 

have often stopped to consider on the portals 
of Notre Dame. No, reader, I am not in- 
dulging in Celtic irony; the device I think 
superb; but oh, let the Republic now and 
henceforth prove its faith by its works. Else 
I shall be saying sadly, with Faust — 

"Die Botschaft hor' ich wohl, mir aber fehlt der Glaube." 
("The message well I hear, my faith alone is weak.") 

It was our custom to go up, on fine morn- 
ings, to the Greek theatre at Tusculum ; and I 
was reading with a friend the Acharnians of 
Aristophanes or some similar play when we 
heard a dull thud in the air which made us 
attentive. One of the men threw himself on 
the ground; we did the like, and we rose con- 
vinced that towards the north cannon was in 
use, to fight or to hinder an Italian advance. 
This will have been on September 12 or 13. 
We had been talking in Rome with soldiers 
of the Antibes Legion when the war began. 
They were eager to join the fighting-line. 
They did so, and went in time to be defeated. 
Now the Holy Father had no troops but his 
own. After much deliberation the Italian 
[Cabinet had resolved on two things: it would 
'not help the French who were still fighting; 
[and it would occupy Rome, peaceably by 



164 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

preference, but by force if necessary. The 
cannonading which we heard in the Greek 
theatre at Tusculum was due to papal sappers 
blowing up a bridge over the Tiber. 

We went back to the English College in 
the Via Monserrato, and an exciting week 
followed. Rome became, by proclamation of 
General Kanzler, a "place d'armes." We 
were in a state of siege. Italian forces marched 
up to within a short distance of the gates, 
commanded by General Cadorna. There were 
these points to be settled, by diplomacy, if 
possible: would Prussia forbid the Italians 
to enter the city? And if not, would Pius 
IX suffer it without resistance? Baron Harry 
von Arnim, the German Minister, went to 
and fro between the city and the camp re- 
peatedly on this business. Now it became 
evident that Bismarck regarded the Vatican 
dogma of July 18 as a declaration of war 
against the German Empire. He would not 
lift a finger to save the Temporal Power. 
But in accordance with his role of "honest 
broker" he would ingratiate himself with both 
parties. It was to no purpose. Of all men 
Pius IX was the least likely to give up a 
clear principle. He answered, in effect, "If 
Italy wants Rome let Italy take it." He 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 165 

would not resist; neither would he open the 
gates. In that sense he wrote late on the 
evening of September 19 to General Kanzler. 
The Italian army must make their assault. 

On the same afternoon the Holy Father 
drove across Rome from the Vatican to the 
Scala Santa, hard by St. John Later an, and 
ascended those famous stairs on his knees. 
The Piedmontese troops were scarcely a mile 
outside St. John's Gate. Many of us joined 
the Pope in his devotions. He gave us his 
blessing, entered his carriage, and drove back 
to St. Peter's. Since that twilight evening 
no Pope has been seen in the city of Rome. 
A seclusion of now nearly half a century has 
shown to Europe the inflexible conviction of 
the Holy See that a great public wrong has 
been done, and that it must be righted. We 
are learning, with Germans for our masters, 
that right and wrong are not unmeaning 
words. 

I have noted elsewhere that Ernest Renan 
saw Pius IX arriving from Gaeta, on April 
12, 1850, in that same Lateran Square, when 
the second period of his reign, unexampled for 
its length in papal records, began. The crowd, 
says Renan, was frantic with enthusiasm., 
Not so when we beheld the last of Pio Nono's 



166 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

earthly rule, on September 19, 1870. The 
people were silent. A great thing was coming 
to pass. The Temporal Power was dying. 

"And so," if I may quote from another 
volume of mine, "in the clear air of that 
September the twentieth, we saw the smoke 
of the cannonade rise like an exhalation from 
Porta Salara round to Porta Pia, and at other 
gates there was a feigned attack; but the head- 
long General Bixio furiously assailed the Porta 
San Pancrazio, while his grenades struck the 
windows of the Vatican, and his artillery 
accompanied with its volleys the Mass which 
Pius IX was saying in his private chapel." 
The assault began at five in the morning. 
"At ten o'clock we saw the white flag waving 
high over St. Peter's dome. We heard afar 
off from our College roof the thunder of the 
captains and the shouting, as through the shat- 
tered walls of Porta Pia streamed a mixed ar- 
ray of soldiers, refugees, camp-followers, along 
the street afterwards named from the Twen- 
tieth of September. Early in the afternoon 
we saw Italian standards floating from the 
Capitol. Rome had once conquered Italy. 
Now Italy had conquered Rome." 

Such were the culminating events of the 
year 1870. The treachery and surrender of 



THE CRISIS OF THE CENTURY 167 

Metz, the siege of Paris, did but confirm what 
had been done at Sedan and at the gates of 
Rome. The nineteenth century was turned 
into a new path where Bismarck led the way. 
But the last enemy was England. Ruin 
England, then the world was Prussia's. How 
should this be gone about? 



CHAPTER VIII 



The Bismarckian Era 



HERE is a text from Ruskin's Fors 
Clavigera (Letter 40), dated April 
1874, which sums up his judgment of the 
Teuton in peace and in conflict. He writes 
first in the abstract: "Blessing is only for the 
meek and the merciful, and a German canno^ 
be either; he does not understand even the 
meaning of the words. In that is the intense 
irreconcilable difference between the French 
and German natures. A Frenchman is selfish 
only when he is vile and lustful; but a 
German, selfish in the purest states of virtue 
and morality. A Frenchman is arrogant only 
in ignorance ; but no quantity of learning ever 
makes a German modest." Then, after an 
illustration from a saying of Albert Diirer, 
this comment follows: "Accordingly, when 
the Germans get command of Lombardy, they 
bombard Venice, steal her pictures (which 
they can't understand a single touch of), and 
entirely ruin the country, morally and physi- 

168 



THE BISMARCKIAN ERA 169 

cally, leaving behind them misery, vice, and 
intense hatred of themselves, wherever their 
accursed feet have trodden. They do pre- 
cisely the same thing by France — crush her, 
rob her, leave her in misery of rage and 
shame; and return home, smacking their lips, 
and singing Te Deums." 

Shall we say "this witness is true," and 
pass over the second stage of the Franco- 
German War, with its blockade of Paris and 
the furies of the Commune, directly traceable 
to that awful siege? We cannot do so for 
several reasons, of which the chief is that the 
German deficiency in meekness and mercy, 
coupled with lack of insight into the French 
character, led them, as Ruskin observes else- 
where, to dig "a moat flooded with waters of 
death between the two nations for a century 
to come." Bismarck would not loosen his 
grip on the stricken land until he had secured 
"material guarantees" against a future French 
counter-stroke. Had he chosen, he might 
have dealt out to the Third Republic, now that 
Bonaparte was a prisoner at Wilhelmshohe 
(significant name, "William's Height!"), the 
same measure of indulgence by which he had 
not only satisfied Austria but subdued it to 
his purpose. For in this, too, the French are 



170 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

unlike the Germans — magnanimity from a foe 
enchants them, binds them to gratitude, is 
written on their hearts. 

But, no, even while he knew the seedplot of 
mischief that he was sowing, the Chancellor 
must have Alsace with Metz, never taken but 
by Bazaine's treason, and a great parcel of 
Lorraine. The French cried, "Not a foot of 
our soil, not a stone of our fortresses." Jules 
Favre, the ingenuous idealist, pleaded for 
consideration with tears; Bismarck dropped 
the French he was speaking, and growled a 
refusal in High Dutch. Nor was he so free 
from care as he pretended. All through the 
desultory winter campaign, and while "the 
disciples of Kant were laying siege to Paris 
with a stern categorical imperative," the dread 
of English intervention haunted his footsteps. 
If England moved, by diplomacy or by naval 
action, Russia would move too. Then the 
integrity and independence of France would 
be saved. 

Why did not England move? She was 
still, though discredited by years of feeble talk 
with no force she chose to employ behind it, 
what Kinglake held her to be, the umpire 
of Europe. When war broke on Lord 
Clarendon's "sky without a cloud," public 



THE BISMARCKIAN ERA 171 

i - ■ 

opinion in this country, misled by Bismarck's 
sleight of hand, was favourable to Germany, 
as defending herself from an arrogant invader. 
But Sedan, Metz, and the pitiless starving of 
two millions of people inside Paris, wrought 
a change. It was felt that the nation had 
atoned by suffering for its errors; and com- 
passion, which was awakened by many sad 
stories from the beleaguered city, called for 
peace on equitable terms. One thing of 
moment then, and decisive of our action in 
1914, the British Cabinet did: it formed a 
"double treaty for the defence of Belgium." 
Farther it would not go. And after some 
hesitation the damnosa here&itas, the fatal 
legacy of Strasbourg (dear to France by the 
noble stand it made) and of the provinces, 
came without a plebiscite into German hands, 
January 28, 1871. Von Moltke it was, if I 
remember right, who observed that it would 
take fifty years to reconcile the annexed people 
to their fate. We may hope now that not 
reconcilement to the German yoke, illustrated 
by such deeds as gave Zabern notoriety, but 
deliverance from it, is awaiting them. 

Ruskin, I was well pleased to find long ago, 
has condemned this award by Bismarck of 
a perpetual cause of suspicion and strife to 



172 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

i 

Germany, with a prophet's rigour. And he 
knew quite as clearly how there came to be a 
Socialist uprising at Montmartre, with cannon 
to belch forth a message, grown very audible 
since then over all Europe, but most terrifying 
when, on March 18, 1871, it proclaimed the 
Commune, or municipal self-government, 
which was to supersede the State. When the 
Vendome column lay dead, so to speak, tum- 
bled ignominiously amid cheers from its base, 
the legend of the "Little Corporal" fell with 
it. The Commune renounced all French vic- 
tories, and declared an everlasting Peace. 

It was rather too soon. For, as Ruskin 
learnt from St. Paul, there is another kind 
of false worship, of "Covetousness, which is 
idolatry"; and he calls it the "Lady of 
Competition and of deadly care; idol above 
the altars of Ignoble Victory, builder of 
streets in cities of Ignoble Peace." There- 
upon he drives his lesson home in words 
which, however violent, I must set down 
here, if I would bring him as a witness at 
all to the tendencies which have made for 
the universal War. They are not my words, 
any more than those taken by me from 
Milton on the subject of king-killing. But as 
Milton, though a regicide, spoke some notable 



THE BISMARCKIAN ERA 173 

verities, which we may apply to our time, 
in like manner Ruskin, while he thunders 
against Capitalism, founds his indictment on 
a world of facts — facts no less deplorable than 
ascertained. This is what he wrote in July 
1871— 

"And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the 
real sources of all deadly war in it, are the 
Capitalists — that is to say, people who live by 
percentages on the labour of others; instead 
of by fair wages for their own. The Real 
War in Europe, of which this fighting in Paris 
is the Inauguration, is between these and 
the workman, — such as these have made him. 
They have kept him poor, ignorant, and 
sinful, that they might, without his knowl- 
edge, gather for themselves the produce of 
his toil. At last, a dim insight into the fact 
of this dawns on him; and such as they have 
made of him he meets them, and will meet" 
(Fors Clavigera, Letter 7, vol. ii, p. 127). 

Socialism, Communism, Nihilism — what are 
these portents that, in mad confusion, sent up 
to God and man their inarticulate message, 
during the "Red Week" of May 1871, by 
burning as much as they could of Paris, the 
"city of delight" and "joy of the whole 
earth"? They burnt the Tuileries, the Hotel 



174 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

de Ville, the Cour des Comptes, the Rue de 
Lille, the great granaries; to Ernest Renan, 
watching from Sevres, it appeared that the 
whole place was settling down in a sulphurous 
conflagration. I have observed in my sketch 
of this amiable dilettante and apostle of sweet 
unreason, "He would have rejoiced at a con- 
quest of Paris by Herder and Goethe; in 
Bismarck and the Red Prince he could dis- 
cern simply the Barbarians." I wrote thus in 
1905, and I went on to say, "He was unjust — 
pardonably in so sudden and frightful a storm 
of war; but those who have lingered among 
the ruins of the Castle at Heidelberg, and 
who remember what Louis XIV made of the 
Palatinate, will be thankful that no French 
soldiers crossed the Rhine in 1870." 

I cannot be sorry that these reflections of 
mine are on record in print. They give strong 
asseveration to my desire of seeing justice 
done to the finer German qualities ; and if now 
I must confess that Renan's view is borne out 
by what we see daily happening, the fault lies 
with those who do such things, not with us 
who refused to believe them possible. Renan, 
like Jules Favre, was in my account of him a 
"disconcerted idealist." St.-Cloud was a heap 
of smoking ashes under the deliberate torch lit 



THE BISMARCKIAN ERA 175 

by German hands ; Auteuil was one ruin ; and 
Renan said bitterly, "the good God vanished 
to make room for an inflexible Sebaoth, who 
could only be touched by the moral delicacy 
of Uhlans, the undoubted excellence of Prus- 
sian bombshells." Do we not already, in these 
lamentations, become aware with Professor 
Cramb that Odin is the German leader, their 
"good old God"? The Breton, who could 
never quite manage to get free of Christianity, 
said, "We are witnessing an Apocalypse." 
He was, and so are we. But woe to the seer 
of Patmos who attempts to throw his visions 
into words! By their very truth they become 
incredible. 

These Socialists, Communists, and Nihilists 
who did all they could to make Paris like unto 
Gomorrah with petrol and explosives, and who 
shot the hostages in cold blood, sixty-seven or 
more of them, with Georges Darboy, Arch- 
bishop, representing the Catholic Church, were 
bent on burning up the past — an evil, inhuman 
past, as they conceived of it. These men and 
women, crying "Neither God nor Master," 
were pitiless, being moved by a strange and 
insane pity, such as Bacon terms, "The wild 
justice of revenge." Many were to the letter 
lunatic, others dreamt of Robespierre and his 



176 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

Jacobin Utopia; not a few had been made 
drunk by the heady eloquence of Bakunin, the 
Russian, who flamed through the West like 
a prairie fire, kindling madness wherever he 
went. 

Of all that Slav propaganda, so passionate, 
so irrational, no sharper etching has ever 
been bitten out than by Turgeniev in Smoke 
— most aptly named. There were some whom 
we should call "Moderates," like Alexander 
Herzen, whose Kolokol, or "Alarm-Bell," 
sounded clearly, yet not stormily, a warn- 
ing that Imperial Russia should have laid 
to heart. I have always felt a keener interest 
in Herzen since I learnt that, when I was a 
boy, I lived not very far from him in the part 
of London where he resided; and I have read 
more than once the account of him in Fraulein 
von Meysenbug's Memoiren Einer Idealistin, 
There are "Moderates" even among Russians; 
and Soloviev was neither Anarchist nor Social- 
ist. But the crowd, and that other crowd the 
newspapers, will always run after a big drum 
loudly beaten. 

Flaming Paris, then, announced on the part 
of militant, international democracy to all 
whom it might concern — and Bismarck was 
among them — "Ecce adsum," "Behold, I am 



THE BISMARCKIAN ERA 177 

: , =3 

here; you must reckon with me." It was 
alarming, even if the voice were that of a 
phantom; how much more if "vox populi, 
vox Dei"? Not that Bismarck, much less 
any long-descended king, would believe it. 
Louis Napoleon, a parvenu, did; and per- 
haps in this article alone of his many 
proclamations was he sincere. But exile, 
Chislehurst, and the crypt at Farnborough 
were to swallow him down. A Zulu assegai 
was to put an end to his direct succession. 
The heavy sportsman at Gratz, called Henri 
Cinq, or Comte de Chambord, had a momen- 
tary gleam of hope in 1875 to be crowned at 
Rheims, which he was advised to extinguish 
in the folds of his white flag. The Republic 
divided Frenchmen least; and it was, not in 
profession only, but by heartfelt assurance, in 
love with peace. 

I must go back for a moment to my ques- 
tion, why in 1870, when France was agonising, 
did not England move? Well, first, there 
was her Majesty, Queen Victoria, executing 
her dead Prince's will, listening with edifica- 
tion to Dr. Norman Macleod as he weighed 
France in the balance and found her wanting. 
There was Mr. Gladstone, whose love of peace, 
reinforced by that of Lord Aberdeen, had 



178 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

persuaded the Emperor Nicholas that Britain 
would not under any circumstances make 
war. There were also the permanent Cabinet 
Ministers, Lack of Foresight and Want of 
Preparation — Chinese mandarins of highest 
rank. But Disraeli thought — to be quite accu- 
rate, he said, and in the House of Commons — 
that if England had exerted her influence in 
conjunction with Russia she might have pre- 
vented the war; at least, by diplomatic inter- 
vention, she could have brought it to a speedier 
end. Prince Bismarck had been fearing what 
Disraeli said was possible; and by an obvious 
but skilful demarche he gave counsel to Russia 
that now would be the time to "denounce" 
that article of the Treaty of 1856 which for- 
bade the appearance of a Russian armed fleet 
in the Black Sea. As he counselled so it was 
done; and the splendid isolation of England 
rewarded him. 

Three times, then, Bismarck played for high 
stakes and won. He got his great indemnity 
of five milliards from France. He had by 
soothing speeches persuaded the King of 
Prussia to let himself be named German 
Emperor. He created a Parliament, the 
Reichstag, on a system of universal suffrage, 
thereby so delighting British workmen that 



THE BISMARCKIAN ERA 179 

they sent him an address of thanks; but the 
suffrage was an earthen clod thrust down the 
gullet of Cerberus, and Bismarck laughed at 
a democracy which could only show its teeth. 
He was responsible to the Emperor, not to 
the Reichstag. All that Germany held or 
owned he could, in emergency, devote to his 
master's purpose. More than any man since 
Napoleon I he wielded absolute power. 

But I have not said or insinuated, whether 
in regard to Bismarck or to Frederick II, that 
great men are digits which alone give a value 
to the national ciphers. If that was Carlyle's 
opinion it is not mine. There was, there is, 
a Deutschland with its deep inspirations and 
aspirations. In the years following 1870 we 
may behold it, under guidance but yet with 
a strength of its own, developing on all sides, 
winning commercial and industrial triumphs, 
increasing in population at a rapid rate while 
France is dwindling, and looking round, chiefly 
outside Europe, for means to expand, for it 
had begun to realise Napoleon's proverbial 
wisdom that an Empire must have "ships, 
commerce, and colonies." Deutschland the 
nation felt and knew this more intimately 
than Bismarck, whose long sight did not pierce 
into that distant scene. He had striven for 



180 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

the hegemony of Europe and it was in his 
hands. To keep it there firmly he invented 
the Alliance with Austria, then turned it by 
the moral conquest of Italy into the Triplice; 
then reinsured at Petersburg against Austria's 
defection. To win over France was beyond 
hope; and in 1875 he thought of crushing her 
by a new invasion. But now Queen Victoria 
felt alarmed. She appealed to Russia. The 
war did not come off. In the West there was 
a long truce, never more than what in German 
is called a Waffenstillstand or armistice, dur- 
ing some thirty-eight years. But in the next 
year, 1876, the Eastern Question burst out 
again with volcanic violence. 

Turkey, during a respite of twenty years 
after the Crimean War, had reformed none of 
her abuses and proceeded on the old course 
of oppression, plunder, and occasional mas- 
sacre done or permitted by her officials. 
There was a Turkish Debt, largely held by 
Britons, and its "financial catastrophe" caused 
an alarm which a mighty massacre in the 
Balkans would assuredly never have occa- 
sioned. But the Stock Exchange is not 
sentimental. In 1876, to quote Lord Morley, 
"fierce revolt against intolerable misrule slowly 
blazed up in Bosnia and Herzegovina; and a 



THE BISMARCKIAN ERA 181 

rising in Bulgaria, not dangerous in itself, was 
put down by Turkish troops despatched from 
Constantinople, with deeds described by the 
British agent [Mr. Gahan], who investigated 
them on the spot, as the most heinous crimes 
that had stained the history of the century. 
The consuls of France and Germany at 
Salonica were murdered on the spot. Servia 
and Montenegro were in arms. Moved by 
these symptoms of a vast conflagration, the 
three Imperial courts of Russia, Austria, and 
Germany agreed upon an instrument imposing 
on the Turk certain reforms, to be carried out 
under European supervision. To this instru- 
ment, known as the Berlin Memorandum, 
England, along with France and Italy, was 
invited to adhere (May 13, 1876). The two 
other Powers assented; but Mr. Disraeli and 
his Cabinet refused." 

Such are the facts; and when we consider 
them we cannot but feel amazed. Germans — 
the same that had ravaged France without 
remorse — act as reforming humanitarians ; but 
England, in the Queen's name, says no; and 
the Turks feel that they have an ally who will 
back them up if Russia speaks to them in the 
gate — at the Sublime Porte. Of course, it 
was not England; it was Disraeli who blotted 



182 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

out the Memorandum. We have come upon 
an extraordinary situation, like a sentence of 
which the lines are reversed in a glass. The 
Germans, if not akin (as is now asserted) to 
the Turkish race, had long been on most 
friendly terms with them. General von Moltke 
had served in the Turkish armies; and mere 
political exigency might be counted on to se- 
cure the help, diplomatic or in the last resource 
military, of Austria, which would draw after 
it Germany, at Stamboul; since the Russian 
designs were known and must be defeated at 
every cost. Salonica was the goal of Austrian 
ambition. Yet the Central Empires were in 
1876 for coercing the Porte; and England 
stood out. The mystery can be solved in a 
word. Disraeli was a Jew. 

Ear be it from me to imagine that every 
member of a highly gifted and much suffering 
race would or did share the sentiments of 
Lord Beaconsfield in this matter of Eastern 
Christians, bowed down under the yoke of the 
Ottomans for so many miserable generations. 
In the Life of Disraeli will be found evidence 
from his own early letters, while travelling 
on the great tour of which Tancred and 
Contarini Fleming are memorials, that he 
was ready to join Ali Pasha of Jannina in 



THE BISMARCKIAN ERA 183 

his expedition against the Albanians; and he 
writes: "I hate the Greeks more than ever." 
Mr. Gladstone spoke of his rival's "Judaic 
feeling" as "consistent and conscientious"; 
and "the deepest, now that his wife has 
gone, in his whole mind." That feeling never 
changed. And it led the Prime Minister, 
with a Conservative majority behind him, to 
encourage Turkey in rejecting the proposals 
of the Great Powers; to challenge Russia at 
the Lord Mayor's banquet in November 1876, 
by talking of "a second or third campaign" 
which England could afford; and to scandalise 
British humanity by light satire about the 
Bulgarian massacres. 

It did more. When Russia declared hos- 
tilities, invaded the Turk's dominions, fought 
the siege of Plevna with enormous losses, won 
it with Rumanian help, and advanced to 
Adrianople, the action of Disraeli saved 
Prince Bismarck from one of the most diffi- 
cult situations in which he had ever been 
placed. Despite Gladstone's pamphlets and 
speeches, Disraeli was skilful enough to 
awaken in the people their old Crimean 
mood. They gave no thought to the Pre- 
mier's "Judaic feeling"; they were alarmed 
for India. So the British fleet passed the 



184 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

. i 

Dardanelles. Then the Russian army drew 
thirty miles nearer to Constantinople; the 
Treaty of San Stefano was signed at the 
beginning of March 1878; and on June 13 
the Congress of Berlin opened with Prince 
Bismarck as its President. Neither Germany 
nor Austria had fired a shot. The Tsar was 
not to enter Stamboul, and the Sultan was not 
to leave it, thanks to the "old Jew," as Bis- 
marck, in his Junker style, but with sincere 
admiration, termed Lord Beaconsfield. This 
was the "Peace with Honour" to which we 
owe a series of Balkan Wars and, by its en- 
trusting Bosnia and Herzegovina to Austrian 
keeping, the Great War itself. 

Gladstone said truly that the voice of Eng- 
land spoke at the Congress of Berlin, not as 
Canning, Palmerston, or Russell would have 
spoken, but "in the tones of Metternich." 
That is why Bismarck praised Beaconsfield. 
Liberal England had joined the Reaction. 
And yet the Liberator Tsar was a menacing 
"Divine figure from the north." By his 
efforts Rumania, Serbia, Montenegro had 
gained their independence. One section of 
Bulgaria was virtually free; the other, fantas- 
tically named by Disraeli "Eastern Rumelia," 
had Home Rule given it, and would join itself 



THE BISMARCKIAN ERA 185 

to Sofia within seven years, when the Balkans 
which divided them "went down with a shout." 
The detested Greeks were told to bargain with 
the Turks; and not until 1881 did they get a 
few scraps of additional territory. Macedonia 
was left to its fate, Armenia to be murdered 
by slow degrees. The integrity of the Otto- 
man Empire had disappeared. Lord Beacons- 
field, its staunch protector, himself dealt it 
fearful blows by the purchase of the Suez 
Canal shares in 1875 — which could not fail to 
bring in its wake the occupation and annexa- 
tion of Egypt — and by the Cyprus convention, 
giving us, as he announced exultingly, "a 
strong place of arms" in the Levant. When 
the elections of 1880 swept him from power, 
the last English defence of Turkey had seen 
its day. 

On Sunday, March 13, 1881, near those 
"Ides" fatal to Caesar, the Emperor Alex- 
ander II was shattered to death by Nihilist 
conspirators in Petersburg. I have always 
considered this gloomy date as marking the 
advent of a wide revolutionary movement, 
taking varied and discordant forms, mild or 
sanguinary, economic or in a more extensive 
meaning social, which overstepped the boun- 
daries of States and gathered up the spoils of 



186 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

many Utopias. The "International" and the 
"Commune" served as preludes to Social 
Democracy. In the West, and above all in 
the German Fatherland, constituted authori- 
ties were face to face with a sort of Religion, 
determined to establish its heaven on earth. 
The assault on property, as now held and 
heritable, became violent all along the line. 
It voted its way into the Reichstag. It 
affected parliamentary groups everywhere. 
And its indirect consequences, according to 
the law of such movements, were as multi- 
plied as contradictory. Among them we have 
to record the termination of the Kulturkampf 
and Prince Bismarck's journey to Canossa. 

The conflict with Rome which he began 
with his May Laws in 1873 illustrates, like so 
many other mistakes of secular princes in this 
department, the wisdom of that old Greek 
saying, "Let alone Kamarina, for 'tis best 
let alone." In more modern language, it is 
dangerous to meddle with great historical 
institutions firmly planted, as is the Catholic 
Church, in the habits and affections of multi- 
tudes. The strokes which Minister Falk and 
his officials showered freely fell, as might be 
expected, even on the Rhenish Provinces, and 
of course on Poland most of all. Bismarck 



THE BISMARCKIAN ERA 187 

was charged with attempting to "murder the 
soul of a nation." The Jesuits were expelled; 
and other religious orders of men and women 
shared their fate. Bishops and priests were 
thrown into prison. Diplomatic relations with 
Rome were broken off. 

I could never find — and I have had oppor- 
tunities more than the average — that there 
were solid grounds for Prince Bismarck's 
suspicions of a Vatican plot against the 
New Empire. The Council of 1870 was 
convoked with entirely other objects than 
to prevent the birth of a German Empire 
which few anticipated. Certainly, no man 
need have been surprised if Pius IX felt 
grieved at Austria's defeat and the downfall 
of France. These were the leading Catholic 
Powers. But what could a Pontiff, who was 
now secluded in his own palace, do to set them 
up again? During the War of 1870, as I have 
already hinted, feeling in high Roman circles, 
which had never been favourable to Louis 
Bonaparte, was one of satisfaction that this 
double-tongued politician should be getting 
his deserts. Prince Bismarck or Professor 
Virchow talked of "Kultur"; but, however 
we take the word, what mischief to Kultur 
did belief in the papal dogma bring with it? 



188 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

No; the real ground was that which Cardinal 
Gibbons has indicated: "The definition of 
Papal Infallibility did more to rescue the 
Church from the dominion of the State 
than anything in modern history." And 
it did so by declaring that the Church is a 
sovereign society, complete in itself, having 
jurisdiction in its own province everywhere 
over its members. Bismarck wanted a mere 
State Church; the Council showed him one 
that was oecumenical. His legislation has 
been curiously described as a reply to "the 
papal edict enjoining the Bishops of Germany 
to set their duty to the Church above obe- 
dience to the State." This "papal edict" 
reads like a well-known verse of the Acts of 
the Apostles; Pius IX was not interfering 
in politics any more than St. Peter and his 
brethren were. 

But the Kulturkampf failed because it led 
to the banding together of German Catholics 
in a Centre Party, which soon developed 
strength, and in time grew to be the most 
powerful in the Reichstag. It may be true 
that parties in the Fatherland compared with 
the State, and especially with Prussia, have 
been generally mere shadows. For something 
like forty years the Centre Party was a reality. 



THE BISMARCKIAN ERA 189 

It is not Catholic now in aim or object; and 
its restraining influence on Prussia can no 
more be found. But in the last twenty years 
of the nineteenth century it boasted, with 
justice often, that "Catholic was trumps." It 
opposed the principles of an unchristian Social 
Democracy at all times. Bismarck felt that 
he needed it; and to secure its help he turned 
to Rome. There he found reigning Leo XIII. 
We saw the future Pope moving unregarded 
in the long episcopal procession through St. 
Peter's on December 8, 1869. He was elected 
amid great expectations on February 20, 1878; 
and his "golden decennium" followed. Living 
retired from courts in the Umbrian city of 
Perugia for thirty-two years, Cardinal Pecci 
took a philosophic view of the world's agita- 
tions. He did not agree with the political 
measures of Antonelli; but his attitude was 
always that of conciliation, not of resentment 
and refusal to consider terms of agreement, 
wherever principle allowed. A scholar and a 
gentleman, of good Middle Italian stock, very 
firm but also very reasonable, Leo XIII 
blended the devout ecclesiastic with the con- 
summate statesman. His mind, fashioned in 
the school of St. Thomas Aquinas, had won the 
Aristotelian balance; it was of a judicial cast; 



190 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

and his exceedingly beautiful Latin prose 
gives delight to those who know by experience 
how difficult is the art in which he shone. He 
had looked into economic problems; he be- 
lieved that harmony might by wise handling be 
created between Labour and Capital. He took 
no pleasure in seeing the Church isolated in 
the midst of modern society. He was a Guelf , 
not a Ghibelline; but when the Ghibelline 
Chancellor held out a rude Prussian hand 
Leo XIII clasped it in his own. 

I cannot refrain from setting down here 
some words attributed to J. H. Newman, 
called into the Sacred College by this enlight- 
ened ruler: "In the successor of Pius," he is 
reported to have said, "I recognise a depth of 
thought, a tenderness of heart, a winning sim- 
plicity, and a power answering to the name of 
Leo, which prevent me from lamenting that 
Pius is no longer here." 

Bismarck went by easy stages to Canossa, 
getting there, to continue the allusion, in 1886. 
The Centre Party joined forces with him 
against Socialism; made him independent of 
Herr Lasker who led the National Liberals; 
and on a celebrated occasion determined the 
passing of much increased Army estimates. 
The Church flourished; but the Jesuits were 



THE BISMARCKIAN ERA 191 

not recalled. Whilst I am writing these lines 
the intelligence comes that their exile as an 
Order will soon be at an end. They will return, 
but not to the Germany of 1873, triumphant 
in many battles, rich in the ransom of France, 
the arbiter of Europe, embarking on a career 
of unexampled prosperity. The Emperor 
William died on March 9, 1888. His son, 
Frederick the Noble, whom we Londoners 
saw driving through our streets to his wedding 
in 1858, followed him, after a reign of three 
months, to the grave. William II was pro- 
claimed; and Prince Bismarck, who had lived 
too long, would soon be saying, "I cannot 
tack on to my career the failures of arbitrary 
and inexperienced self-conceit, for which I 
should be held responsible." Nevertheless, it 
has been remarked that the picture of Prussian 
autocracy in the later days of the Chancellor, 
after 1885, is a sombre one. "It is a pic- 
ture," writes Professor Morgan, "of suspicion, 
treachery, vacillation, and calumny in high 
places, which remind one of nothing so much 
as the Court of the later Bourbons. It is a 
regime of violence abroad and dissensions at 
home." And so the great man passed from 
power. 



CHAPTER IX 



Enter Kaiser Wilhelm 



WILLIAM II began his reign on June 
15, 1888. He was the eldest son of 
Frederick III and his wife, Princess 
Royal of the United Kingdom, herself the 
eldest child of Queen Victoria. This pedigree, 
which gave him Prussia, with the title of 
German Emperor thrown in, entitled William, 
so he seems frequently to have argued, likewise 
to the succession of the British Empire, claimed 
by Edward VII, and recognised by the four 
hundred millions of his subjects. I mention 
this somewhat bizarre delusion, not for its own 
sake, but as raying out light on the character 
of one who combined in himself many of the 
traits which indicate an unbalanced, highly 
fantastic and self-centred mind. The Kaiser's 
pretensions were unbounded from the first. 
Hence he was the very man to take up ideas 
from which Prince Bismarck, with his long 
experience of European politics, would have 
recoiled. Bismarck aimed consciously neither 

192 



ENTER KAISER WILHELM 193 

at a World-Empire to be won by German ef- 
fort, nor at the destruction, much as he in- 
trigued for the enfeeblement, of British power. 
But these were to become, by intense brooding 
over possibilities and chances, at length the 
master-thoughts, as end and means, in the 
morbid imagination of the young sovereign 
who now, "dropping the pilot," made a "wild 
dedication" of himself 

"To unpath'd waters, undream'd shores; most certain 
To miseries enough." 

Heaven pity us all! There is no language, 
not Shakespeare's own, adequate to the 
"mighty stage and hero least heroic," on which 
and by whom this Tamburlaine extravaganza 
was to be acted. Sober words revolt us as too 
chill, too frostbitten, for the description of 
Sahara whirlwinds and fiery simoons of death 
in which Europe has been, by his signing of a 
single telegram on July 31, 1914, carried vio- 
lently forward into a new age, scarcely yet 
conceivable. Is the Kaiser greatest of men 
ever inflicted on humanity by the German god? 
Or not great in any way, more than the wooden 
figure-head in front of the ship, borne along 
by that which it seems to be guiding? A 
figure-head, yes, but very much alive, and to 
such extent answerable for the course. But 



194 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

neither a Frederick II nor a Bismarck. We 
must seek deeper causes to save us from scorn- 
ing the nations that this second-rate mouther 
of fustian could "tarre on" to smite and anni- 
hilate one another. I see such causes, and I 
name them Autocracy and Democracy, Pagan 
State-worship and Christian liberty. But 
Wilhelm counts also. 

Critics have been tempted to set the Kaiser 
down as the ape of genius, imitative and futile 
— which judgment we must allow in the prov- 
ince of art. To deny him real powers of 
mind, with energy to use them, would be a 
slur upon ourselves and all Europe. For he, 
though seeming now silent and still as an 
exhausted volcano, did during twenty-five 
years make upon us the impression of a demo- 
nic force, not to be tired out. What was he, 
then? Identifying himself with Prussia — but 
also Prussia with Hohenzollern — I liken him 
to a first-rate general advertiser, travelling 
agent, and chief controller, of the firm called 
"Deutschland," adding with Hoffmann von 
Fallersleben, "iiber Alles"; that is to say, 
which defies competition, and is the leading 
European establishment, with branches in 
Vienna and Stamboul. In more than one 
sense, Wilhelm was the "Reise-Kaiser." He 



ENTER KAISER WILHELM 195 

l 

was a poster of the sea and land, with a ready 
tongue, a journalist's gift of picking up knowl- 
edge, and of mistaking its true significance, 
a picturesque outward semblance, made or 
marred by three hundred uniforms, a persever- 
ing insolence which could be put down by no 
rebuffs from any gentleman, and that priceless 
quality in days when "copy" rules the world, 
an histrionic make-up, producing the unex- 
pected, from an interview with the Daily 
Telegraph to a Flying Dutchman's descent at 
Tangier. Tell me that such a living kaleido- 
scope has no genius! Until the War, with 
its dun pall of smoke, hid and partly smothered 
him, this man, who is, and perhaps will be, 
the last of the Hohenzollerns on the throne 
of Prussia, was every inch a king. An auto- 
crat, mind you, strong enough to let Bismarck 
go down the companion-ladder, while he 
would govern henceforth by mediocrities — the 
Caprivis, Billows, and Bethmanns, who took 
his orders with lackeylike deference. In short, 
Kaiser Wilhelm was a character and a force, 
so long as he was anything. Now he is no more. 
Do I then suppose that he directed Ger- 
many as a god from the machine ? He thought 
so; but the idea which lay hid in the Teutonic 
soul was greater than Wilhelm, greater than 



196 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

i — — - 

Bismarck had been; and it shaped the national 
policy. That idea was Pan-Germanism. We 
have come into a cloudland where Englishmen 
do not love to dwell. Yet surely it is true 
that the dim workings of an instinct in a whole 
people control them to wide issues, known but 
in part to one or another, though conspiring 
to definite ends. The Germans suffer gladly 
autocrat, bureaucrat, aristocrat. They are 
servile at home, ambitious and high-soaring 
when they project themselves in fancy abroad. 
They do not believe in our freedom, or want 
it, or even respect it. But since the day of 
Rossbach, since Leipzig, Waterloo, Sadowa, 
Sedan, they were growing into a deep sense of 
patriotism, which in 1890 had become aware 
of its own capabilities between anaemic France, 
hysterical Russia, impoverished Italy, with 
England some way off — the Midgard snake 
coiled up in its ocean-nest, or uncoiling to 
encircle the globe. Germany felt, and the 
War has largely justified her feeling, that 
unless England came in she could break the 
Continental Powers. This consideration deter- 
mined her programme. England must be 
thrown into a magic sleep, and the magician 
was Kaiser Wilhelm, favourite grandson of 
the venerable, much-loved Queen Victoria. 



ENTER KAISER WILHELM 197 

But what of German Socialism? Here it 
was that the Kaiser began his apprenticeship 
to the trade of autocracy. Louis Napoleon, 
poor dreamer, had wished that all benevolent 
schemes to help the toiling millions should be 
his design and doing. He could but create 
a restless proletariat. In Germany to make 
of Socialism a State affair was much easier, 
at least in appearance. Bismarck's repressive 
laws in 1878 had failed to get rid of the Social 
Democrats. He destroyed their propaganda; 
but he could not exclude them from the 
Reichstag, and their influence grew. The 
young Emperor, as Gertrude Atherton brings 
out well in her Rulers of Kings, entered into 
close alliance with Capital and its overlords 
on both sides of the Atlantic. But he wished 
his Government to be a national relief com- 
mittee, just as the Deutsche Bank was to set 
other banks an example of fostering enterprise 
wherever Germans could peacefully penetrate 
foreign markets. The autocrat, if he is wise, 
will do all whatsoever Socialism would like to 
do without him. He will give his subjects 
everything that is good for them; but they 
must feed out of his hand. Many among us, 
not seeing that freedom is a spiritual endow- 
ment, while food, shelter, clothing, housing, 



198 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

i . . i 

police, old-age pensions, are in themselves but 
material conditions, would joyfully accept the 
Kaiser's boon. And perhaps Carlyle has en- 
couraged them. But I can see him flinging 
that mess of red pottage into Annan Water. 

It was, indeed, painfully clear from the 
experience of years, that votes had somehow 
not succeeded in multiplying loaves; that the 
just claims of Labour to a reasonable subsis- 
tence-wage and all implied therein still de- 
manded, but could not get, satisfaction. The 
Liberal movement fell into discredit. Votes 
plus laissez faire, ending in monopolies among 
employers and murderous competition among 
the employed, were brought under the raking 
fire of Carlyle and Ruskin, whose destructive 
logic, forming the prolegomena to all future 
schemes of social reconstruction, will give 
English readers, in a style most piercing and 
most relentless, a sufficient idea of the line 
taken at home and abroad, by those who 
believed in the divine right of the labourer to 
his hire, and that a fair one. The Californian 
economist, Henry George, gave world-wide 
currency to the panacea known as the Single 
Tax; but in doing* so he asserted that the 
citizens of the United States who had votes 
without capital were as much excluded from 



ENTER KAISER WILHELM 199 

a share in its Government as negro slaves had 
been previous to emancipation. That a political 
system called Liberalism should be in jeopardy 
was, perhaps, a sign of closer touch with fact 
and realities. But Liberty itself received a 
shock, and benevolent Caesarism gained thereby. 
The largest application of autocracy to 
economics of the State which had been prac- 
tised since the time of Diocletian, was now 
to be tried. That is the distinctive character 
of modern Germany. The nation was to be 
not only an army, but in many respects a 
phalanstery. Sparta translated to the Spree 
should be rigidly logical, except in one par- 
ticular — great private fortunes might be won 
or increased, so long as the Kaiser's rule got 
the benefit of them, present and prospective. 
The scheme, then, was autocracy tempered by 
monopolies; in brief, an economic Junkerdom 
with the Emperor at its head. I beg the 
reader's very careful attention to these pheno- 
mena. Had they not been created, the War 
of 1914 would never have taken place. By 
them were transferred the whole resources of 
the country into Imperial hands, giving to the 
proclamations of the War Lord an apparently 
inexhaustible fund on which he could draw in 
time of need. 



200 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

No other country had an armed and militant 
commerce, or so much as thought of it. To 
all others the conception of economics was in 
the main private or individual. The State 
could tax but not organise trade; and to 
make it a weapon of war was not dreamt of 
in their philosophy. Least of any did Free 
Trade England glance that way. Quite the 
opposite. Her manufactures, minerals, trans- 
port services, exchanges, syndicates, news- 
papers, could be bought and sold in the open 
market by German, Jew, Yankee. The whole 
was a public auction. Any one might nat- 
uralise himself, yet keep his birthright intact. 
The honours of Parliament were open, on this 
easy condition, to all men. Imports and ex- 
ports alike were free. Britain had one defence, 
her Fleet. And she had no more. She lay 
there, in her ocean-nest, a Midgard snake 
whose fangs might by force or fraud be 
drawn; then the gods of Valhalla would feed 
sweetly upon her. These metaphors sum up 
the greatest perils that have ever lain in wait 
for the British Empire. 

Kaiser Wilhelm, or the brooding genius of 
Germany, had thus not only beaten Social 
Democracy, but captured and exploited the 
strength that was in it — an amazing piece of 



ENTER KAISER WILHELM 201 

luck, due, however, to the strategy which 
takes the offensive when the foe comes within 
striking distance. This peculiar effect of 
Conferences of Berlin, social enactments, and 
State backing of private enterprise, was, I 
think, quite overlooked at the time. How 
to meet the demands of Socialism occupied 
men's minds in Western Europe. But that a 
cunningly devised State Socialism might be 
turned to the aggressive purposes of Welt- 
politik, who was far-sighted enough to per- 
ceive it between 1890 and 1900 save those that 
set it up? And they, for aught I know, were 
groping, but in the right direction. 

There were many side-issues. Time has 
demonstrated that this was the "Main," the 
rest mere "Bye plots." Germany, victor on 
land in a Europe disunited and feeble, came 
to the resolution, as her population grew with 
prosperity while the room she had for them 
dwindled, that she must win colonies, create 
an unconquerable fleet, keep her sons under 
her flag, and stretch on and on, till she arrived 
by way of the South-Eastern line, through 
Austria, Turkey, and Asia Minor, at the 
Persian Gulf. Count these heads of policy, 
and you will see that every one of them 
menaced the British Empire, already begin- 



202 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

ning to be undermined, as if it were China in 
decrepitude, by "peaceful penetration." The 
Pan- German idea has been realised, in its 
constructive part, almost to the letter. There- 
fore it was not an empty dream. What we 
have yet to see is whether its aggression upon 
England will succeed. Unless it does the 
Pan- German idea will be rolled up like a 
scroll, and pass away in fire. 

Those French five milliards gave the capital 
needed as a starting-point. Socialism with its 
sham voting power made much noise, but 
actually served as a lightning-rod to draw off 
strokes from the Government, by seeming to 
assure the "comrades" outside, all over Europe, 
that it could and would prevent the Kaiser from 
embarking on war. Italy, suffering at home, at 
odds with France, had no choice but to remain 
in the Triplice, an unwilling yoke-fellow with 
Austria. Lord Salisbury, who was Premier 
in the early years of Wilhelm, in 1891 ceded 
to him Heligoland, as being of no value to 
us, while its possession by foreigners insulted 
German pride. So far back as 1884, Count 
Minister had asked, in a "quiet talk" with 
Lord Granville, that Germany might be 
allowed to take the island, promising to make 
it into a "harbour of refuge." "This was too 



ENTER KAISER WILHELM 203 

much," observes a commentator, "even for 
the easy-going Lord Granville." But, as Dr. 
Johnson said, "useful diligence will prevail"; 
and the request, a second time urged, was 
granted by a Tory chief. 

In the language of Homer one is tempted 
to say that Lord Salisbury was a "great 
simpleton"; just as Lord Palmerston was 
when he laughed at the idea of the Suez 
Canal; and a much later statesman who let 
the enemy build and open the Kiel Canal, 
amid congratulations from our Admiralty, 
while we delayed ten years before completing 
our Naval station at Rosyth. Simpletons, not 
criminals, gentlemen all, jolly, or philosophic, 
or smooth-tongued rhetoricians, to whom 
some god refused insight and foresight! But 
if simpletons, innocents; and here beginneth 
the second lesson. The first was Prussia's 
organising scheme, governed by one consistent, 
subconscious thought. This second reading, 
lamentable as a doom fallen upon us, I take 
to be an old story, England the Unready. 

You will not have forgotten that passage 
in Froude where he speaks of the "kind of 
prologue" which in history "sometimes an- 
ticipates the true opening of the drama," as if 
"the shadows of the reality were projected 



204 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

forwards into the future." The war with 
Denmark for Schleswig-Holstein was, we said, 
such a prologue, foreshadowing the Bismarck- 
ian Era. Now, as a curtain-raiser to the vast 
European and American fight for freedom, 
came the Boer War, in which England played 
what seemed to many a German part. I could 
tell, and may if I am spared do so elsewhere, 
some very curious circumstances, happening 
long ago, which would have made that war 
impossible. But the chance was not seized by 
the unsophisticated Britons, friends of mine 
much later, to whom fortune offered it. The 
Boers had trekked over the Vaal; the Rand 
was discovered to have gold which, like that 
of the land of Havilah, was good; but it 
literally accomplished the curse of Timon; 

"Make large confusion, and thy fury spent 
Confounded be thyself." 

Johannesburg rose like an exhalation, and a 
very unwholesome one, from those deep cut- 
tings for ore. Let me not talk of Mr. Glad- 
stone, Majuba, "say suzerainty," the Outland- 
ers, or the idle rhyme of the exploiter — 

" 'This/ he said, in perfect Yiddish, 
'Must be ours, for it is Bridish.' " 

I believe England had a good case, when "Dr. 



ENTER KAISER WILHELM 205 

Jim," with our neighbouring ground-landlord 
in Oxfordshire, Sir John Willoughby — both 
have since done excellent service for the 
Empire and S. Africa, yet this cannot justify 
them — went on the ever-memorable Jameson 
Raid, and spoilt that case in the eyes of 
Europe. They were well beaten — and how 
many were taken prisoners? No matter. I 
will only remark that on me the impression 
made by that unlucky stroke was as if the 
Atlantic liner, Britannia, had suddenly re- 
ceived the blow of a torpedo in mid-ocean. 
From stem to stern the great vessel shivered; 
a wide rent was torn open in her side. Presi- 
dent Kruger, whose name the British public 
would not stoop to pronounce aright (careless- 
ness, not insolence, it was, but a bad sign, 
betokening the less desirable qualities of this 
insular people), had not, like envious Casca, 
made the rent. The envious Casca was Kaiser 
Wilhelm. "I sincerely congratulate you," 
the Emperor cabled to the President at 
Pretoria, on January 3, 1896, "that without 
making any appeal for the help of foreign 
Powers, you have succeeded, with your own 
people and your own strength, in repulsing the 
armed bands which have troubled the peace of 
your land." 



206 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

Here was a flash of what Dr. Emil Reich 
calls "deliberate lightning," aimed straight 
from Potsdam at the British Empire. It was 
meant to be insolent, and was aggressive. The 
Kaiser saw his chance, as he thought; and 
Britain's African dominions were to be hurled 
into chaos. Our Government, which claimed 
to be suzerain of Transvaal, "kept silence even 
from good words." Thus began the policy, as 
undignified as misleading and dangerous, of 
handling the Kaiser much as a timid wife 
manages her drunken husband who is likely 
to beat her. An ignoble simile? doubtless; 
and a situation corresponding to it, which 
Nelson, Canning, or Palmerston would never 
have endured. 

Since these things fell out such a Niagara- 
flood of events has poured under the bridges, 
carrying some away, that we are in the posi- 
tion of historians, able to throw into perspec- 
tive the closing years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. The Kaiser was our foe. By ambition, 
by loyalty to Prussia, by hatred of our incur- 
able Liberalism, this royal Jacob had made up 
his mind to supplant his uncle Edward, and 
to bring the British Empire down. Queen 
Victoria bore the seeming escapade of her fa- 
vourite grandson in despatching that message 



ENTER KAISER WILHELM 207 

to Pretoria with patience, perhaps with a 
smile. No more ill-timed forbearance could 
be imagined. A bully should never be toler- 
ated. Yet crowds of English men and women, 
after the Kruger telegram, cheered the Kaiser 
on his progress along the streets of London. 
It is difficult to characterise behaviour so 
unpatriotic, so indecent. I will call it Byzan- 
tine, which to those who have read the story 
of Constantinople is severe. 

But let this fact be noted: by January 1896 
the Kaiser was England's enemy. There is 
a story which, in my fancy for symbolism, 
I have thought significant. Once, when a 
lad, Prince William at Sans Souci, or what- 
ever it was, suffered a violent attack of 
bleeding from the nose. His attendants 
were alarmed. "Don't be frightened, Meine 
Herren," said the Crown Prince, asking for a 
towel, "these are the last drops of English 
blood leaving my veins." By 1896 he had 
quite got rid of them. He was, without 
knowing it as we know it now, Pan-German. 

That "omen to the prologue coming on," 
which will be famous and condemned — cer- 
tainly condemned, in spite of Joseph Cham- 
berlain and Cecil Rhodes — as the "Jameson 
Raid," put England in the wrong. Because 



208 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

I hold her to be absolutely right, and even 
stainless, in the matter of originating the 
World- War, I am not one of those who ab- 
solve her rulers from ineptitude, or even worse, 
in dealing with South African problems. Mr. 
Gladstone was a heaven-born politician; but 
outside a certain sphere his acquaintance with 
human nature was limited and unreal. Of 
Mr. Balfour I shall say nothing. Our present 
situation justifies the finger on the lip. Most 
of us will now grant that the War with Trans- 
vaal and the Orange Free State could probably 
have been avoided by a more far-sighted and 
less capitalistic policy. The gold of the Rand 
is not, believe it who will, an ethical postulate. 
Peace to these once smouldering ashes! I 
need only remark that the Boer War, in which 
our generals knew so little and had so much 
to learn, lasted from October 11, 1899, until 
May 31, 1902. It happened that I was travel- 
ling pretty often and to considerable distances 
on the Continent during that period, and came 
in contact with French, Italian, Greek, and 
German opinion at the several crises of our 
South African enterprise. With rare excep- 
tions it was unfavourable, even in Rome and 
Athens, to Britain. Our sailors felt it whom 
we encountered at Messina and the Piraeus. 



ENTER KAISER WILHELM 209 

This was the more remarkable because Italians 
and Hellenes still worshipped Gladstone's 
memory, as they had excellent grounds for 
doing. But President Kruger seemed to them 
the champion of freedom, England the op- 
pressor. Had the Deutsche Bank no concern 
in feeing these voices, these "most sweet 
voices," to bellow reproaches against Albion? 
We know what it has done since, directly or 
indirectly; we may draw our own inferences. 
By the year 1900 the conspiracy against Brit- 
ish Power was thoroughly engineered from 
Berlin, on every line of attack, diplomatic, 
commercial, journalistic, and even religious. 
The Pan- German furnaces were in full blast, 
vomiting out flames on the cloudy heavens, as 
I have seen them in the Black Country on a 
winter's evening. Europe had begun to 
agonise. A new age was at the doors. 

Queen Victoria, that valiant lady, adored 
by her subjects, celebrated by Mr. Kipling and 
M. Bourget as "the Widow of Windsor, who 
owns half the world," had exclaimed with 
spirit that she was not going to die to please 
Mr. Kruger. But the South African War 
would not end, though victory for Britain was 
already assured. The blunders of a most ele- 
mentary kind with which it began had given 



210 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

place, in our "rough island" fashion, to a strat- 
egy that the Republics could not cope with, 
and an unexampled skill, capable of transport- 
ing over six thousand miles of ocean two hun- 
dred thousand men, with horses and munitions 
in proportion, such as no distant sea had borne. 
It was a warning to the Kaiser, had he been 
a wise man, and not merely a brilliant impre- 
sario. That was, that would be, Britain's way 
should hostilities with Germany break out. It 
was the historic meaning of Disraeli's boast 
concerning a "second and third campaign." 
However, Lord Roberts came home a con- 
queror, and her Majesty gave him the Garter. 
On Tuesday, January 22, 1901, she died at 
Osborne. 

On the afternoon of February 1 — I was 
then living at Dorchester-on-Thames, a few 
miles south of Oxford — it chanced that my re- 
vered friend, Dr. Darwell Stone, now head of 
Pusey House, and I were walking on the road 
which goes by Nuneham Harcourt, when a 
sudden long-distant sound arrested our con- 
versation. We listened. The dull but distinct 
pulsations continued at regular intervals. We 
were hearing the salutes from the double line 
of warships between which the dead Queen 
was carried across the Solent, from the Isle of 



ENTER KAISER WILHELM 211 

Wight to Gosport. Of so much we could 
be quite certain. People came out from the 
villages and stood silently at attention while 
the cannon boomed. Queen Victoria, whom 
I, when a boy, had seen going to open Parlia- 
ment, was now journeying to her long home. 
What we did not know, and what few but the 
innermost circle of diplomacy could imagine, 
was that those guns, the reverberation of which 
from the Channel to the Thames we were 
hearing, announced the coming War. 

It was already written in the Book of Fate. 
When the Kaiser hastened to his grandmoth- 
er's dying bed, no doubt he was touched, for he 
is a man of emotions, and the English people 
felt kindly towards him. But not for an 
instant did he falter in his design to supplant 
his uncle Albert Edward, now Edward VII, 
King of Great Britain and Ireland, Emperor 
of India. To make war on Queen Victoria 
would have been an outrage; yet by the 
Kruger telegram he had risked even that. 
He was now, in comparison, free. The acute, 
the quivering nerve, would be the question 
of supremacy on water, of a fleet that might 
challenge, or at least cripple, the British 
Navy, with Kiel Canal as the connecting- 
link of North Sea and Baltic, besides docks 



212 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

i 

and materials along that coast from which an 
expedition against England could be most 
easily sent. How soon could such a fleet be 
constructed? Antwerp should certainly be- 
come a German city. There must be a 
Zollverein with Holland. Railways should 
be planned and built running towards the 
Belgian frontier. Spies on an elaborate sys- 
tem were needed and would be bought for 
use — and, of course, Germans would, in 
effect, be spies in all countries, East and 
West — to provide maps, statistics, informa- 
tion down to the most minute detail, which 
the General Staff would sift and store up 
against "the Day." Sketches are made before 
a masterpiece; and the Kaiser was busy 
sketching in his own mind or by the hands of 
his agents the great Pan-German design, even 
while moving at Windsor in the funeral pro- 
cession of Queen Victoria. 



CHAPTER X 



The Matter of Britain 



ON May 31, 1902, the Peace of Vereeni- 
ging was ratified at Pretoria. By the 
terms adopted, and still more by the spirit of 
wise conciliation thanks to which South Africa 
found complete self-government within the 
Empire, that old renown of England, envied 
and hated in the Prussian Court, won fresh 
lustre, but provoked its enemies to assail it 
wherever it seemed vulnerable. Had a true 
Prophet been consulted on the future speedily 
impending, and would he have given reply, 
not as ancient oracles did, but in plain speech, 
he must have said somewhat as follows — 

"War is darkening the whole sky. The 
nations cannot escape it. For there is civil 
strife in Heaven. The polities laid up there 
among Platonic ideals, of a benevolent master 
ruling over slaves, and of free men ruling over 
themselves — we will call each of these exemp- 
lars a god — are coming to equal and opposed 
perfection, whether we look at the spirit 

213 



214 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

within, or the need of realising them in visible 
and earthly elements. Europe is divided be- 
tween those ideals; and Europe has parcelled 
out the globe by acquisition or influence. 
But Germany, which is the living genius of 
autocracy, is not content with her share. 

"How can she be? Her population will run 
to seventy millions in a dozen years. She has 
no means of housing them at home; she will 
not, if she can help it, suffer them to be lost 
to her abroad under foreign flags; and where 
are the colonies that should receive them as 
a Greater Fatherland? Others than Germany 
have long since taken all worth having in 
Farther Asia. Africa seemed to be left for 
German use and profit. But France holds 
one great section; Portugal another; and 
Britain, advancing everywhere, designs a rail- 
road from the Cape to Cairo, which as back- 
bone of the Continent will give her command 
of all its resources. Why speak of Australia? 
There, too, Britain reigns. The Old World 
is barred to German expansion as a colonising 
Power. Yet she must colonise or perish, or 
come to terms of lasting peace with England, 
France, Russia. 

"And yet again," the Prophet would con- 
tinue after a pause, "any attempt she makes 



THE MATTER OF BRITAIN 215 

at peaceful colonising — and she will make 
many — is doomed to failure. Therefore Ger- 
many will go to War. But first, her African 
enterprises will break down in well-merited 
dishonour. After that, her hopes to build 
a German State in South America will be 
dashed by the Monroe Doctrine, even as 
Louis Napoleon foundered in Mexico. She 
will be driven east and south-east, under Pan- 
German leaders. Austria will give her no 
trouble; and Turkey — whether Abdul Hamid 
stay at Yildiz Kiosk, or new and vile phantoms 
which I dimly discern misgovern in his stead — 
Turkey will be had for the bribing. Ah, if 
that ubiquitous Britain were not planted in 
Egypt and India! Then the Baghdad Rail- 
way, whose metals gleam in my vision from 
Ismid and trail towards Basra, might be the 
beginning of joy to Teutons in a glorious Asia 
Minor, first protected, then annexed by the 
friendly Kaiser, whose Black Eagle would 
love to fly over three hundred millions of 
Moslemin. 

"But no, it cannot be. For Britain rules 
the waves, and her gunboats will ascend the 
Tigris; and whatever it cost her she will 
not endure a wedge like this, thrust between 
her Egypt and her India. Will Germany 



216 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

try again? Yes, in the Mediterranean at 
Tangier, on the Atlantic at Agadir, always 
striving to break or bridle England's mari- 
time power. And she will fail again and 
again. Then she will know that the supreme 
effort must be made near home. Her fleet, 
already second in the world, must become 
the first. Her sea-coast will absorb the Bel- 
gian certainly, the Dutch if necessary. Not 
in waters far away, but amid the fogs and 
shoals of the North Sea, younger Teuton 
will try conclusions with elder Anglo-Saxon. 
And other enigmatic shapes I perceive gliding 
through the gloom of ocean-deeps, with strange 
loud birds whirring high up above the clouds, 
forms of slaughter which never had a likeness, 
hurling down death or sending it up from 
the nether abysses. But everywhere Britain 
assailed, and answering back! Will the 
nations join in? Surely, a company on each 
side, growing till none remain behind neutral. 
Yet the war is between the Land-Power and 
the Sea-Power; a war of ideals and a Day of 
Judgment. I tell you it is already darkening 
the whole sky. You have my leave to go." 

Thus far my Prophet, after the event. To 
us whose gift of prevision is small, the future 
was more clouded, though not entirely hidden. 



THE MATTER OF BRITAIN 217 

But our men of light were few, and they could 
secure no leading. Politicians went cheerily 
on, leaving to-morrow's cares till they came. 
That imaginary seer for whom I invented the 
above harangue, saw effects in their causes, 
large impersonal issues in a world-story; but 
he did not touch the question of guilt or 
innocence. Nevertheless, it is our question. 
I mean that there is a right and a wrong 
in the human actors, even if they be whole 
nations, who began to grapple one with 
another in August 1914. The general situa- 
tion of interests and forces, I grant, has been, 
in my Prophet's dithyrambs, faithfully given. 
Now we have to point out dispassionately that 
Britain was not the assailant but the assailed; 
that her Allies were blameless too; and that 
the Central Powers, if brought to the bar at 
a Hague Tribunal where Equity sat judge, 
would be cast in damages. The strongest 
proofs of all this are extant in narrated facts ; 
they do not depend on mere assertion or 
inference. 

When Edward VII took the high place 
which Queen Victoria left in such honour, 
two things were evident. First, this England, 
during the Queen's reign, was ever complaisant 
to the German and, from long before 1870, to 



218 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

the Prussian Power. By rigid non-interven- 
tion she had allowed the New Empire to at- 
tain more than its legitimate strength. It is 
not much of an exaggeration to say that Al- 
saee-Lorraire was given to the Prussian War- 
Lord with England's blessing. In Africa, 
where Prince Bismarck entered somewhat 
slowly on colonial adventures in 1884, the 
British not only permitted but actively pro- 
moted the formation of the German East 
African territory, which broke their own line 
from south to north; and Lord Salisbury threw 
in Heligoland as a douceur to melt the Teu- 
tonic heart at home. By 1900, thanks to our 
complacency, the Kaiser had no less than 
900,000 square miles of the Dark Continent to 
his credit. 

Even a more momentous surrender must 
be put on record. Though Disraeli had saved 
Stamboul from the Russians, and did his 
utmost to limit the triumph of the released 
Christian nationalities, England, by the time 
of Edward VII, was determined never again 
to lift a hand on behalf of Turkey. A resolu- 
tion worthy of all praise; but the alternative 
surely was not to leave the Ottoman Empire 
as a floating derelict at the mercy of pirates — 
which is what happened — but to insist on the 



THE MATTER OF BRITAIN 219 

i 

reforming clauses of so many previous treaties, 
including the Cyprus Convention, and to have 
them executed under the eye of Europe. 

In dealing with Turkish questions, I am 
afraid we must allow, the successive British 
Governments acted with a self-regard un- 
worthy of our obligations as of the nation's real 
desire, which was neither cynical nor careless, 
but very much confused by ignorance. We are 
now paying a heavy ransom for the mistakes 
on a great scale termed the Crimean War, the 
Berlin Congress, and the Turkish Revolution 
of 1908, to the last of which we contributed 
by letting the Germans assume at Constanti- 
nople the office we had abandoned as chief 
adviser to the Sultan. But my contention in 
this paragraph is that, by so doing, we cleared 
away the most formidable hindrance to Ger- 
man expansion south-eastward, even to the 
shores of the Persian Gulf. As in the sphere 
of economics we, by our Free Trade policy 
and by the freedom of the seas, opened our 
markets, manufactures, ports, and ocean- 
routes, to be exploited from Berlin; so by 
our easy ways in Africa, by our abdication 
of influence at the Porte, and by our ready 
acquiescence in the project of the Baghdad 
Railroad (concession to German syndicate, 



220 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

1899) we surrendered to an enemy the means 
of our destruction. 

Nevertheless — or rather, still more because 
of these things — that enemy hated us. And 
here is the second point I have to make. In 
1902 Britain, though she had won a series of 
victories in South Africa which no other Power 
could have compassed, stood alone; vaguely 
feared, it may be, she had fallen into grave 
differences with France, while her natural 
friend and ally, Italy, was united in a bond 
not soon to be broken with Austria and Ger- 
many. As regards Russia, our politicians 
appear to have said once for all, "Voila 
Tennerm!" The great men of the Wilhelm- 
strasse in Berlin, taught by Bismarck, were 
delighted to encourage these complex dissen- 
sions. They had one clear aim: to divide the 
Powers while themselves increasing army and 
navy to the utmost pitch in efficiency and 
numbers. Britain, I must repeat, had no sense 
of the general situation, therefore no definite 
view in foreign affairs, and was groping at 
midday. Warnings, indeed, came from those 
that knew. They took the form of drawing 
attention to the growing menace of a strong 
and stronger German Fleet; and to some 
extent they created a wholesome alarm. They 



THE MATTER OF BRITAIN 221 

also revealed to the incredulous ears of Eng- 
lishmen that there was an idea called Pan- 
Germanism, which would give trouble before 
many years had passed. This, however, was 
pouring water into a sieve. We do not, in 
London, discuss ideas except when they begin 
to burn down the Athenseum, which is their 
British sanctuary. 

It was not very soon that King Edward 
became aware of Pan-Germanism as a con- 
crete reality dangerous to the peace of Eu- 
rope. But England's isolation, he thought, 
should cease. Knowing persons have argued 
that it was Lord Lansdowne who began to 
think, and who persuaded Edward VII to take 
up the part of general peacemaker. We need 
not try to find out. The result was all one; 
and foreign Courts noted it with surprise. 
England had resumed her long-abandoned 
function of guarding or restoring the Balance 
of Power. I am aware how displeasing is 
the "Balance" to speculative Liberals; but I 
cannot get away from history. Call it by any 
other name, the fact which was now asserting 
itself in real "World Politics" was parallel 
to the conduct of this nation in every previous 
age, whenever a single Power threatened to 
lord it over the Continent. Our British King 



222 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

saw so much as that, and he acted up to his 
duty. Pan-Germanism could not be appre- 
hended at once ; for it was a mystical religion, 
with legends, dreams, and a novel fanaticism, 
to give it a questionable shape. But a new 
Napoleon at Potsdam instead of the Tuileries 
could be explained by his French prototype. 
Observe, then. This first step of Edward VII 
to end England's isolation has been held by 
German diplomacy, and represented to the 
world at large, as an attack on German inde- 
pendence. The British sovereign, they said, 
meant to raise a Coalition which would destroy 
the Fatherland root and branch. 

What the Edwardian policy had in view 
was to rescue Britain from the slough of mis- 
understandings where politicians had left her 
floundering. The King came to an agreement 
with France and settled Egypt ; he approached 
Russia, and the confusion which had so often 
nearly brought us to blows was at length 
cleared up. We were safe in India; the 
spheres of influence in Persia were marked 
out. I cannot, even in passing, name the 
country of the Lion and the Sun, that ancient 
land now running to sandy wastes, without 
a deep feeling of regret — the land to which 
we owe Firdausi and Hafiz, not to speak of 



THE MATTER OF BRITAIN 223 

traditions more august. But I do know that 
England the Civiliser might have played a 
beneficent part in rescuing the people from 
misrule and decay, at almost any time and 
at small cost during the last half-century. 
They longed to see the Briton of whom they 
heard so much good, where only the Russian 
came, or where they languished under a cor- 
rupt anarchy. The official mind lives in 
pigeon-holes; it abandoned Persia to the first 
who would take it, and men like Valentine 
Chirol preached to the Foreign Office in 
vain. And so, in due course, there was a 
Teuton in power at Teheran. 

However, I must quit this melancholy, this 
fascinating theme. To return to Edward VII. 
His royal progress to one Court after another 
has had lasting effects. France learnt that 
England would be her friend, at all events 
while the King lived. The Dual Alliance of 
the Republic and Russia began to ripen into 
the Triple Entente. Light dawned on the 
chaos of Europe. Those whom sharp critics 
term peacemongers, not peacemakers, will 
argue now, as they did then, that measures 
of self-defence (and diplomacy would fall 
under their censure no less than war) can 
never be justified because they provoke the 



224 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

aggressor. We took ours reluctantly, in a 
slow, hesitating way, doing as little as we 
could, and doing it late. Over western 
Europe, outside Germany, a wave of non- 
resistance, glinting with false smiles of peace, 
flowed after 1890; nor was it checked by 
the South African hurly-burly. In France it 
rose to a height. Men like Urbain Gohier 
wrote on The Army against the Nation. 
Socialists like M. Herve insulted the flag. In 
the secular schools a propaganda denouncing 
war — any war — flourished exceedingly. The 
Government was for doing away with decora- 
tions, military bands, the officers' mess, and 
taught soldiers to disobey. Lectures were de- 
livered exposing life in the army as cruel and 
inhuman. Need I do more than mention 
"L 'Affaire" and flee from it? Then there 
was the scandal of "les Fiches," with much 
else too saddening to recall. But I draw one 
conclusion, as certain as mathematics: France 
had not the shadow of a design upon Ger- 
many. The .sorrow of lost Alsace and Lor- 
raine might be deep in French hearts. No 
line of French policy from 1900 onwards was 
dictated by it. 

Those who have undergone a surgical opera- 
tion will never be the same after it that they 



THE MATTER OF BRITAIN 225 

were before. To what does this commonplace 
tend? It tends to prove a fact anterior to 
the War of the like of which we have had 
repeated and even terrible experience during 
the War. When Germans have resolved to 
commit a crime, they begin by charging the 
victim with intending to do it first. We 
remember with shuddering how in this way 
we were advertised of Zeppelin raids, murder 
of prisoners, poison-gas attacks, ruthlessness 
at sea, torpedoing of hospital ships. The 
spies of all ranks and professions whom Berlin 
dispatched into what I shall henceforth desig- 
nate the "Allied Countries," knew well, and 
must have reported at headquarters, that 
the Peace Movement was widespread; that 
governments, especially of the Liberal- Social- 
ist pattern, favoured it; that none talked of 
attacking Germany, while all were hoping that 
the War might be staved off indefinitely. 
But to admit these things, however certain, 
would have been fatal to the continued 
increase of the army estimates and have 
shown the Navy League in its true colours, 
as intending to destroy the English supremacy 
at sea and with it the British Empire. Con- 
sequently King Edward VII, Sir Edward 
Grey, M. Delcasse, and the Western Powers 



226 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

,_: • ' w = : 1 

were accused of planning to destroy Ger- 
many, its people, and its institutions alto- 
gether. It was to be wiped out. 

On the principles of the "German War- 
Book" any war may be called offensive or 
defensive, as you like it. But the genius who 
inspired that volume, Clausewitz, held that a 
State always makes offensive war, and needs 
no justification beyond the hope of succeeding 
in its object. Thus the Kaiser's Council works 
on a system of double entry. The "just 
war of self-defence" is intended for the public 
which still uses old-fashioned terms of con- 
science. The real and sufficient motive is the 
State's "will to power." And so Treitschke, 
"Ours is an epoch of war; our age is an 
age of iron. If the strong get the better 
of the weak, it is an inexorable law of life." 
Deutschland was strong, Europe was weak; 
and England could be lulled to sleep until 
the time came to finish with her. Behold the 
logic and the ethics of the situation! A pre- 
text, however, was wanted by way of persuad- 
ing the "good German conscience." There- 
fore let it be repeated by all babble-machines, 
for ten years on end, that the British, French, 
and Russian Governments were in a conspir- 
acy to ruin the Fatherland. Of course, it was 



THE MATTER OF BRITAIN 227 

the other way about. "The Prussian Govern- 
ment/' says Prof. Morgan in his introduction 
to the volume cited a few sentences earlier, 
"has always attached the greatest importance 
to taking away its enemy's character before 
it despoils him of his goods." . . . 

When I was on the point of continuing 
this lamentable story, in which envy, cruelty, 
cunning, and infinite falsehood are converted 
by the Teuton theory of State-worship to 
virtue and patriotism, I glanced at the morn- 
ing's news. And I read as follows: "The 
Hague, April 30. The German authorities in 
Louvain have ordered that the ruins of all 
houses burnt in 1914 are to be removed. All 
traces of burning in Louvain must disappear 
within four weeks. The expense of the work 
has to be borne by Louvain." 

There is an art of wickedness and meanness 
not attainable without long study, constant 
practice, and a spirit congenial to it. I offer 
the German General Staff an expression of 
my feelings on the admirable illustration thus 
afforded of what their "War-Book" pre- 
scribes. To violate a neutral country, burn 
its university — with shootings and other out- 
rages, quantum sufficit, to exemplify "Ter- 
rorism" — then, on the eve of possible de- 



228 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

parture, to make the victims clean up the 
traces of crime by which they have been 
deprived of home and all they had; and to 
compel them to do this at their own cost; is 
a stroke of genius far beyond a dramatist's 
invention. Ave, Ccesar, Imperator! 

I pass on. From the year 1883, according 
to the witness of Lord Ampthill, then our 
ambassador in Berlin, hatred of England was 
intensified by Bismarck's Colonial policy. The 
State commanded it; and "we always do 
what our sovereigns tell us." Twenty years 
of such "mothering" followed, under guidance 
of Treitschke and the academic garrison, of 
whom Lord Acton wrote: "they hold Berlin 
like a fortress." These high teachers were 
"almost equally united," says Prof. Morgan, 
"in a common detestation of France." By 
1903, therefore, Kaiser and people, politicians 
and learned men, were of one mind. The 
General Staff had its plans, based on Moltke, 
for the invasion of the West through Belgium, 
all ready. The Army governed; and "in this 
shirt of steel the body politic was enclosed as 
in a vice." The double game of threatening 
and ensnaring went on. There was a "brutal 
offensive" preparing; and in a drumfire of 
phrases which startled Europe the Kaiser 



THE MATTER OF BRITAIN 229 

announced it: "Germany's future lies on 
the water;" "that trident must be in our 
fist;" "when you meet the foe you will 
defeat him — no quarter will be given, no 
prisoners will be taken. . . . As the Huns a 
thousand years ago under Attila ... so may 
the name of Germany become known;" "you 
may have to fire on your own parents or 
brothers. Prove your fidelity then by your 
sacrifice;" "you must all have only one will, 
and it is mine; there is only one law, and it is 
mine;" "nothing must happen anywhere in 
the world without Germany's consent;" and 
"we stand in bitter need of a great German 
Navy." 

These calculated explosions did their work. 
They cleared the ground. Obedient as an 
echo, the Reichstag voted for a scheme by 
which the Navy "should become so formidable 
that not even the mightiest" — read in margin 
the British — "would dare to attack it." In 
1907-8 Heligoland was sheathed in concrete 
and made a "German Cronstadt, covering the 
mouths of Weser, Elbe, and the Kiel Canal." 
Those of us who were moving about in the 
Reich just then could hear of excursion-trains 
carrying patriots at cheap rates by the thousand 
to admire the new Gibraltar. We heard many 



230 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

other things of similar moment; but England' 
was cumbered about much serving; and when 
Mr. Lloyd George passed through Frankfort,i 
his errand was to find out whether he had 
started National Insurance on the best lines. 
Our own "Navy League" was a private fancy, 
with twenty thousand members. The German 
had a million, and they believed in their kind 
of National Insurance. Their Army, in a time 
of peace, when Russia sat licking her wounds 
inflicted by Japan, and when the West lay 
still, amounted to three-quarters of a million, 
ready for Krieg-mobil. But the Kaiser had 
meditated peace from his tender nails; only, 
as Treitschke wrote in 1863, the Almighty 
had not "commanded us Germans to allow 
our enemy to march undisturbed on Berlin." 

This was the double game of menace and 
make-believe at which Kaiser Wilhelm showed 
himself an adept. He longed — oh, how ard- 
ently! — for alliance with France. He slipped 
into Paris incognito, they say. But England, 
but Windsor, was his boyhood's home. He 
took liberties with our ironclads, as being a 
British Admiral. He perorated at Guildhall 
on the blessings of peace. He came over 
uninvited with a staff of secretaries, and spied 
out the land. He wrote a private letter to 



THE MATTER OF BRITAIN 231 

Lord Tweedmouth, who was First Lord of 
the Admiralty, on February 17, 1908, to help 
in cutting down our Naval Estimates. He 
advised Mr. Haldane how to set about re- 
organising the little Army of Britain. His 
brother, Prince Henry, rode through England 
at the head of several score of motor-cars ; and 
our Teuton visitors photographed, sketched, 
took notes for a military Baedeker. The 
German Admiralty did not lag behind. Their 
fleets manoeuvred off Devonport (to which 
Heligoland's fortification was an answer) and 
in Bantry Bay. I had nearly forgotten the 
staff-ride of German officers through Kent, 
the letting loose of a couple of thousand 
carrier-pigeons from Dover, the visits of dis- 
tinguished generals and military experts to 
the East Coast and the Mersey during their 
holidays. England lay in her magic sleep; 
the Kaiser had certainly hypnotised his vener- 
able foster-mother. 

And each time he came to flatter he went 
back to execute the next part of the Great 
Plan. It is all down in black and white ; con- 
front the dates, and draw your conclusions. 
Never was a murder more carefully thought 
out by a Palmer of Rugeley than was the as- 
sassination of the British Power by Queen 



232 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

Victoria's grandson. I speak on the evidence. 
And I defy England's most inveterate enemy 
to show that this country had intended mis- 
chief to the German people, or to the House 
of Hohenzollern. As for France, the Teuton 
diplomacy, inventive as it is, could trump up 
no pretext on which to send its ultimatum of 
July 30, 1914, except the fact of the under- 
standing with Russia, now nearly one quarter 
of a century old. 

But I must go farther still. Britain would 
not only not make war on the Fatherland-, 
she refused to provoke it by framing an 
adequate defence. Her Tory Government did 
as little as the Liberal- Socialist Governments 
which from 1905 to 1914 held the reins. 
They trusted the Kaiser; they scouted the 
Pan-German peril. I recall with pride and 
sorrow my friend, the late Sir Rowland Blen- 
nerhasset, who knew Germany and its rulers 
more intimately than any other English-speak- 
ing writer except Lord Acton. His wife, 
German born, was the most learned of literary 
women in the German Empire. I might 
appeal on this head to Count von Hertling, 
the Bavarian Premier, who had every oppor- 
tunity of acquaintance with her family and 
her writings. Sir Rowland, then, published in 



THE MATTER OF BRITAIN 233 

the National Review a series of articles, laying 
bare the full political scheme of Prussian 
expansion, which had taken in Austria by 
the way, and was absorbing the Turkish 
dominions — in short, the thing we have seen 
accomplished. Other experts revealed the 
hopes and resources of the German Fleet. 
Others again called attention loudly to the 
significance of the Baghdad Railway, which 
the Deutsche Bank proposed to build chiefly 
with cash drawn from the pockets of John 
Bull. Even on the mysterious theme of 
German finance in the City, disclosures were 
not lacking. Fate, so to speak, was showing 
her cards. 

But did Premier or Foreign Secretary look 
at them? On the contrary. With ex- 
quisite politeness they held their eyes down 
and gazed on the floor — of the House of 
Commons. They would not believe, although 
they might have seen. Sir Edward Grey was 
willing to let the Baghdad Expedition — 
directed, as our armies know this deadly 
springtime, against Egypt and India — was 
willing, I repeat, to let it run upon British 
sleepers, all expenses found, had not private 
effort in England's cause obliged the official 
mind to retract its decision. Lord Roberts 



234 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

could not get a hearing for his plans of Home 
Defence. But the Fleet was starved; or, to 
quote the convenient words of Emil Reich on 
the years 1904-1907: "while the British Naval 
Estimates have been reduced by six millions 
sterling, the German have increased by three 
millions. While British arsenals and dock- 
yards are being reduced and neglected, those 
of Germany are being rapidly developed. It 
is only a continuity of policy on both sides 
that has led to the reduction of the number 
of British ships in full commission and an 
increase in the German." In 1902 we had 
"no North Sea Fleet and no North Sea 
policy." The year after saw a Committee of 
National Defence set up ; our great ships were* 
to leave the Mediterranean, which was put in 
charge of our new friends, though not yet 
allies, the French; we should then be able to 
keep a protecting eye on the German Ocean. 
But we wanted a Naval basis for the new 
departure, and Rosyth was fixed upon. It 
would take ten years to improve the existing 
anchorage. A North Sea Fleet came into 
precarious being. But "its ships were not 
modern, or in the least capable of meeting the 
German squadrons," did they come to invade 
us from Emden and the Frisian sands. When 



THE MATTER OF BRITAIN 235 

war broke out in 1914, Rosyth was still wait- 
ing to be improved into a base. Govern- 
ment sternly frowned on the project of a ship 
canal between the Forth and the Clyde. And 
this was England's attack on Germany. 



CHAPTER XI 



Lightning out of the East 



TURKEY, the predominant Power of 
the Near East," said General von 
Bernhardi, writing in October, 1911, "is of 
paramount importance to us Germans. She 
is our natural ally. Turkey is the only Power 
which can threaten England's position in 
Egypt and menace the short sea-route and 
the land communications to India." These 
were among the motives which had induced 
the Kaiser to take under his protection so far 
back as 1898 the Sultan Abdul Hamid, whom 
Mr. Gladstone branded as the "Great Assassin 
on a throne." The Sultan was held in this 
country to be answerable for the massacre of 
many thousands of Armenians. During the 
present War Turkish free lances have rooted 
out the whole nation with indescribable fury; 
while the Germans have looked on and the 
Kaiser made no sign. It is evident, therefore, 
that in 1898 he had completely adopted the 
principles which make of success in Statecraft 

236 



LIGHTNING OUT OF THE EAST 237 

the justification of exploiting the crimes of 
third persons, "such as assassination, incen- 
diarism, robbery, and the like." When he 
thereby became suzerain of the Sultan-Caliph 
he was but obeying his own War-Book. 

As already noted, between Prussians and 
Turks there had long existed a sympathy, of 
race perhaps, but of aims and character without 
a doubt. Both were proud, self-centred, inso- 
lent slave-drivers, at odds with Liberal Europe, 
orthodox fanatics of a religion which served 
them at once as Church and State, in virtue 
of which they found themselves lords of the 
ascendant. To the mind of Turk as of Teuton, 
peace was "the suspension of a state of war"; 
and man's noblest normal condition was fight- 
ing. General von Moltke, who came down 
in the line of thought from Clausewitz, had 
when young trained a portion of the Ottoman 
Army. Now General von der Goltz, his 
disciple, would undertake to beat into these 
dull, brave men the German system of drill 
and discipline. Fate hid from his eyes that 
one day the rifle of a Germanised Turk would 
shoot him dead, in an Asiatic campaign to with- 
stand the Russians and the English. Bismarck, 
at the Congress of Berlin, aided Beaconsfield 
to rescue Turkey in Europe from utter dissolu- 



238 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

tion. The Kaiser was described in the years 
after 1898 to the thousands of the faithful as 
a converted Nazarene ; his silver lamp hanging 
before the shrine of Saladin, Kurdish saint and 
hero, bore witness to his faith in the Prophet, 
and was regarded as a thankoffering. "Pro- 
tector of Islam" might be added to his other 
titles; fez or turban to his official headgear; 
"Allah Akbar" to his war-cries. He had 
lifted his glass and thundered "Hurrah!" at 
many a royal banquet. In 1908, by a mocking 
echo from Stamboul, he and all Europe heard 
the ironical answer, "Huriyeh!" The "Com- 
mittee of Union and Progress" raised it in 
token that they were bringing "enlighten- 
ment" to the subjects of Abdul Hamid. 

"Huriyeh," we learn from Sir Mark Sykes, 
"is a portmanteau expression of the greatest 
capacity; it at once describes an era, an his- 
torical incident, a mood, and a school of 
thought; also, it has various interpretations 
besides; among others it means 'liberty.'" 
This Pandora-box, with Hope standing con- 
spicuous above its motley contents, had been 
conveyed to the Golden Horn from Paris by 
a horde of adventurers, whom the present 
Shereef of Mecca and King of the Hejaz 
denounced in solemn terms to all true Moslems 



LIGHTNING OUT OF THE EAST 239 

as renegades to Islam or to Judaism, of which 
respectively they were born subjects; as gypsies 
and nondescript trash ; offscourings of the East 
thrown back by the West and bent on the 
destruction of religion. Their leaders, Enver 
Bey, Niazi Bey, and the rest, called themselves 
"Young Turks" ; their object was to inaugurate 
a French Revolution in Turkey, by which 
all the nationalities owing allegiance to the 
Sublime Porte should become free and equal. 
Such was the meaning of "Huriyeh" — not 
the Koran and the sword, but the principles of 
1789 with a Civil Constitution. From Salonica 
they directed their efforts, through well-advised 
anarchy, to break up the old system. Abdul 
Hamid yielded in appearance, perhaps even in 
fact. He restored the Constitution of 1876, 
which he had given and taken away, with its 
grant of "equality before the law" to all his 
subjects of whatever race or creed. Universal 
brotherhood was proclaimed. Turks, Greeks, 
Albanians, Jews, Armenians, embraced in the 
open. Enver Bey and his "perverted free- 
masonry" won loud applause from the Liberal 
West. But imagine what a counterstroke this 
was felt to be in Potsdam! Yet the new- 
drilled Turkish army was marching pretty 
fast, at the bidding of the Committee, towards 



240 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

the Sultan's deposition. And how could the 
Pan-German idea be secured now? 

"Liberty" struck its first blow on July 22, 
1908. We cannot believe that the Central 
Empires contrived "Huriyeh"; or that they 
lost one moment before taking counsel together. 
The man of the hour was Von Aerenthal, an 
ambitious Austrian minister. By his advice, 
fatal to millions of men in the sequel, a step 
was determined upon which I count as being 
the immediate occasion of the World- War. 
He persuaded the Emperor-King, Francis 
Joseph, to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina. 
This meant nothing else than a violation of 
the Berlin Treaty; it was to tear these provinces 
from the Sultan, and finally to enclose Serbia 
in a ring-fence which during thirty years she 
had been striving her utmost to elude. 

Francis Joseph, a man upon whom all the 
sorrows of life had come, but who learnt so 
little from them, signed that decree on Oc- 
tober 2, 1908. The Kaiser had praised him for 
his backing, as a "brilliant second" of Ger- 
many, in the political duel at Algeciras; he 
had promised an equal return. The call was 
now made. For by seizing the two provinces 
of which Austria was but the legal adminis- 
trator, ambitious Aerenthal raised the half- 



LIGHTNING OUT OF THE EAST 241 

slumbering Eastern Question to a frenzy of 
strife. On October 5, 1908, Bulgaria, which 
always had understandings with Austria, de- 
clared her independence. The Balkans were 
shaken as by an earthquake. Russia, which 
had created them, was the natural guardian 
of these new Christian States; what would 
Russia do? Thus, like a brand into a powder- 
magazine, the question had been flung into 
the midst of the Great Powers which, when 
it should be stirred up a second time, in July 
1914, would kindle all the world. 

Russia took half a stride forward, since the 
Tsar was bound to protest. Then the Kaiser 
leaped up "in shining armour," and dared him 
to advance another inch. This very curious 
duel, or flourish before possible fighting, will 
reward our close attention. The two Powers 
did not engage in war; but Prussia won a 
victory more than diplomatic, while the huge 
Slav Empire underwent defeat. How was 
the result achieved? I answer, by calculation, 
or by what is known in physics as "potential 
energy." The Prussian theory of a policy 
which always moves on force, though not 
necessarily breaking the nominal peace, never 
had a more complete illustration. 

When the Kaiser says repeatedly, "I did not 



242 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

want war; I have not willed it," he speaks as 
"falsely true" as any oracle ever did. What he 
wanted were the spoils, not the combat; no 
hazards, no German lists of casualties, but the 
prize which millions of casualties could only 
win. Bear this Prussian double-tongued dealing 
always in mind; you will then have mastered 
the dialect and the morals of the Wilhelm- 
strasse. It is the secret of successful juggling 
in diplomacy. You never intend anything 
but peace ; only your peace is armed, a prologus 
galeatus to exterminating war, should your 
modest request meet denial. There is a perfect 
story picturing the situation, about a "Coffee- 
King," in Lawson's Frenzied Finance, which 
in my gasping for space I have no room to 
insert. But go back to our political chess- 
board. A consummate player, who knows 
himself to be within three — nay, within six, 
moves of giving checkmate, points out the 
inevitable end to his adversary, and wins the 
game without troubling to move the pieces. 
Even so will be the compelling method of 
"potential energy" in Weltpolitik. Russia 
was made to see three moves ahead; the 
chessboard fell with a crash; but the Balkan 
Alliance sprang up armed. 

Yes, in spite of Clausewitz, the best-laid 



LIGHTNING OUT OF THE EAST 243 

» 1 

schemes of Berlin "oft gang a-gley," and so 
they did in this able device of pushing Austria 
towards the Aegean, thus realising another 
stage of the Pan-German advance. For, as I 
used to tell unbelieving Oxfordshire farmers 
in 1886, we, that is to say, Great Britain, had 
a life-and-death interest in Salonica. They 
had never heard of such a place; and could 
scarcely credit that St. Paul had written 
Epistles to the natives in those parts. Salonica 
is a sad name to many of us now. But thus 
the situation was created which followed soon 
upon the policy of Vienna condemning Serbia 
to be an Austro-Hungarian "enclave," with- 
out a seaport, without markets, unless the 
swineherds of the Danube would be content 
to sell their produce in the Dual Empire. And 
Russia with its almighty Tsar could not come 
to the aid of the Balkans. 

Here the double and treble distilled treach- 
ery of the Prussian system may be caught in 
the act. Germany had not renewed Bismarck's 
reinsurance at Petersburg. But the Kaiser, 
as if he were the late Charles Pearson, had 
driven Russian fancy distracted by constant 
talk and a picture — literally painted by his 
own amateur hand — of the "Yellow Peril." 
Japan was going to swallow up Eastern Asia. 



244 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

Must we repeat the muddled story of Port 
Arthur, so discreditable to English diplomacy; 
— the acquisition by the Prussian "mailed fist" 
of Kiao-Chau; the Russo-Japanese War; the 
Dogger Bank disaster; the triumph of science 
in Japanese hands ; the Treaty, under American 
auspices, of Portsmouth, U.S.A.? Happily, 
there is no need. Remark, however, the in- 
variable mischief-making which would seem 
to be the Hohenzollern conception of foreign 
policy. Bismarck encouraged France to seek 
expansion in Farther Asia that she might 
keep her hands full, and off Germany. He 
manoeuvred the Court of Vienna towards the 
Balkans chiefly on the same account; for he 
was never exactly a Pan-German. And the 
Kaiser stands responsible for the challenging 
acts of Russia, to which Tokio could not reply 
except by war. The false intelligence which 
brought on the Dogger Bank incident, and 
almost, in consequence, hostilities between 
England and Russia, has been confidently 
traced to Berlin. For the Teutonic key- word 
is Schadenfreude, delight in another's mis- 
fortune. But though in 1908 and 1912 the 
Tsar did not dare to move, the Balkans could 
form a league. To the world's astonishment 
that league proved itself capable of miracles. 



LIGHTNING OUT OF THE EAST 245 

r i 

In 1912 another War of Liberation flamed up. 
And the last agony of Turkey in Europe still 
holds us at gaze. 

For, to quote Sir Mark Sykes again, who, 
from his own point of view, is admirable on 
this subject, "The fall of Abdul Hamid"— he 
was deposed in 1909 — "has been the fall, not 
of a despot or tyrant, but of a people and an 
idea. . . . He ruled ill, in blood, confusion, 
and terror." He fought for the old order, 
"pertinaciously but despairingly." And so, 
his surrender to the "Young Turks," who 
pretended to have drunk deep of the spirit of 
the age, was not quite unwilling. But, con- 
tinues Sir Mark, "in the place of theocracy, 
Imperial prestige, and tradition, came atheism, 
Jacobinism, materialism, and licence. ... In 
an hour, Constantinople changed; Islam, as 
understood by the theologians, as preached 
in the mosques, as the moral support of the 
people, as the inspiration of the army, died 
in a moment; the Caliphate, the clergy, the 
Koran, ceased to hold or inspire." 

And in that hour, Macedonia calling to 
them, Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbians, Montene- 
grins, united to their wonder by the Cretan 
Yenizelos, nay, by Ferdinand the Fox, poured 
out in battle array, soldiers of the Cross, 



246 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

trained to the best weapons, with modern 
French artillery, and rushed upon the Ger- 
man-drilled Ottomans, who faltered and fled 
before them. It was a strange great epic, that 
first Balkan War, in the dark autumn of 1912. 
"Turkey in Europe was lost," writes its 
friend, Sir Mark Sykes, "lost because dissi- 
pated, half -educated, emasculated babus could 
not lead a disillusioned peasantry whose God 
had hidden His face from a faithless people." 

I quote with respect; but in these matters 
we must choose our side. The Allies have 
chosen theirs in the decisive reply to President 
Wilson, where they announce their intention 
(as I find it rendered in the National Review , 
May 1917) as "the setting free of the popula- 
tions subject to the bloody tyranny of the 
Turks, and the turning out of Europe of the 
Ottoman Empire." For myself, I printed on 
January 1, 1913, the following words under 
title, "The Year of Redemption." I take 
this "child of golden Hope" into my arms 
once more. 

"Few of us," I said, "that remember the 
Crimean War with its impotent conclusion at 
Paris in 1856, or the iniquitous Treaty of 
Berlin forced upon Europe by Prince Bis- 
marck and Lord Beaconsfield in 1878, ever 



LIGHTNING OUT OF THE EAST 247 

r i 

hoped to witness the great deliverance of 
Christian serfs from Turkish misrule that has 
now come to pass. The cannon of Bulgaria 
have been heard thundering in the heart of 
Constantinople. The Ottomans have been 
swept, bag and baggage, out of Macedonia. 
The Greeks hold Salonica by right of their 
sharp sword. The Serbians lie entrenched 
and victorious in their ancient capital, Uskub, 
and have marched over the mountains down 
to the shining waters of the Adriatic at Du- 
razzo. The Montenegrins keep watch round 
Scutari, 'the Desired.' Turkey in Europe 
is, to all intents, a thing of the past. Let 
diplomacy juggle and cheat as it will — as it 
always has juggled and cheated — the year 
1912 remains the Year of Redemption. And 
the enslaved peoples themselves have wrought 
it, with a courage, a science, a splendour of 
design and united action, that leave the whole 
world agape in admiration at their exploits. 
Not Russia, not Austria, has conquered the 
old enemy of Christendom; but these shep- 
herds, these farmers, these merchants — yea, 
these keepers of swine in Serbia. It is the 
hour of the Magnificat: 'He hath put down 
the mighty from their seats, and hath exalted 
them of low degree.' Fifty and six years ago, 



248 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

Europe affirmed the integrity of the Ottoman 
Empire. Providence judged a very different 
judgment, and has now executed it by the 
hands of the long-despised Greeks and Slavs." 
I published these words, which still have 
life in them and truth, during the armistice, 
when Sir Edward Grey was presiding (and his 
virtual shelving in this manner we attribute to 
German astuteness ) over the ineffective Confer- 
ence in London. Negotiations failed; the war 
began again. Sir Mark Sykes writes of "the 
unnatural Balkan Confederation," as if there 
were something monstrous in Christians who 
were, or whose fathers had been, "rayahs" under 
the Turk, forming a league against him. Un- 
happily, there sat on the throne of Bulgaria one 
who was an Austrian officer before all things, 
and who sent his Dr. Danev to bring the key 
of Stamboul from Vienna, where it had long 
been guarded. In the first phase of the war 
the lines of Chatalja had proved too hard for 
King Ferdinand's exhausted troops. A com- 
paratively moderate Treaty of Peace with 
Turkey now followed. But it left large terri- 
tories to be divided. The Balkan alliance 
fell to pieces. And Ferdinand, who wanted 
Macedonia for himself, acting through his 
general Savov, while Austria gave him the 



LIGHTNING OUT OF THE EAST 249 

■ " — — —"^—— — — ■— ^i— ■ 'I ■— 

needful impulse, committed as black and fatal 
a deed of treachery as may well be conceived, 
by attacking his late friends and comrades 
unexpectedly, on June 16 (O.S.), 1913. Four 
days earlier, M. Sazonov wrote to this officer- 
king: "You are acting on the advice of Aus- 
tria; you are free. Russia and Slavdom are 
rejected. We have done our duty. . . . For- 
get the existence of any of our engagements 
from 1902 down to this day." 

Once more the diplomacy of the Ballplatz 
was blowing the war-furnace into a blaze. On 
the other hand, as Mr. Douglas Sladen well 
observes, "the strength of the Balkan League 
threw a power as strong as Austria into the 
balance of Europe on the Russian side. To 
suppose that Russia took any part in breaking 
it up is sheer imbecility." And it is false. 
For on June 15 (O.S.) Count Tarnovski, 
Austrian Minister at Sofia, telegraphed to 
Count Berchtold at Vienna: "Bulgaria wishes 
to know if she will have a free hand in attack- 
ing Greece and Serbia should she give up to 
Rumania the line of Tutrakan-Balchik." The 
answer came: "Bulgaria knows on what 
conditions, in attacking Greece and Serbia, 
she can be secured in the rear." To Austria's 
account, therefore, we must lay the second 



250 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

i 

Balkan War, and all that came of it. I 
quote in epitome, by way of further proof, 
the remarkable admission of M. Atanas 
Shopov, formerly Bulgarian Consul-General 
at Salonica. He wrote in the Mir of January 
21 (O.S.), 1914— 

"From the beginning of the War in the 
Balkan Peninsula two political tendencies 
were at strife: the Triple Entente and the 
Triple Alliance. The Entente favoured the 
Balkan Confederation; while the Triplice 
sought to compromise and ruin it, as being 
contrary to its own interests. This latter 
policy prevailed in Bulgaria, where during 
the winter and spring of 1913 a very lively 
and astute agitation was carried on, not only 
among the Opposition, but in the Supreme 
Command as well as in the army at the 
front." 

This appears to be the simple truth. Hence 
the second Balkan War has been termed 
a royal coup d'etat, preparing even when 
Adrianople fell to Serbian valour. Men like 
Radoslavov refused the arbitration proposed 
by Russia. Ghenadiev, the heir of Stam- 
bulov, became a link between Ferdinand and 
the irresponsible Macedonian Committee; all 
these three took their orders from Vienna. 



LIGHTNING OUT OF THE EAST 251 

s 

Treachery began the assault on Greeks and 
Serbians, who replied with such vigour that 
Bulgaria lost the whole of her previous gains 
at the moment when Rumania moved her 
forces over the Danube and was sending them 
on to Sofia. Then, with piteous gestures, the 
Ministry which had insulted the Tsar's Gov- 
ernment now on its knees implored his inter- 
vention. Russia's diplomacy saved the rem- 
nants of the stricken army, and persuaded the 
Rumanians to wait outside the Bulgarian 
capital so that an accommodation might be 
reached. 

The Peace of Bucharest, in which Dr. 
Dillon played his part, could not satisfy any 
of the belligerents; but it delighted the Aus- 
trian heir-apparent, Franz Ferdinand. His 
organ, the Reichspost of Vienna, broke out in 
jubilant tones: ''The world was ready to 
hand over the Balkans to Pan-Slavism as a 
spoil. By a single stroke all that is changed." 
It went on to explain — and we should grave 
the words in our memory — that "Latin 
Rumania with its brilliant future" had 
proved to be one hindrance; that another 
was "the granite block of Albania," which 
barred the paths of Serbian expansion towards 
the Adriatic; and that the "Slavonised Bui- 



252 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

garians," just because they were not Slavonian 
enough, had been deprived of their leadership 
by their quondam allies. It concluded in a 
passage of deep significance: "The outcome 
of these Balkan quarrels presents no forbidding 
features to the Dual Monarchy or the German 
nation. The last war brought larger calamity 
to the Pan-Slavists than the first brought to 
Turkey. The bounds of that Slav dream are 
set for ever. In the Balkans it has defeated 
itself. Europe is free from a great danger; 
the Austro-Hungarian Empire from a menace 
which specially regards her." 

But more remains behind. From the reve- 
lations of M. Take Jonescu, the celebrated 
Rumanian statesman, which were confirmed 
almost directly by Signor Giolitti, speaking in 
the Italian Parliament, it is beyond a doubt 
that Austria meditated war on Serbia during 
August 1913. The policy of the Ballplatz, 
in warning M. Jonescu as it did, was to hold 
Rumania sufficiently in check; and so Count 
Berchtold announced that "Austria-Hungary 
was ready to defend Bulgaria by force of arms." 
To San Giuliano, the Italian Foreign Minis- 
ter, this proposal was described as a "preven- 
tive measure," which would constitute a casus 
foederis, thereby entitling the Triplice to aid 



LIGHTNING OUT OF THE EAST 253 

and maintenance from the third partner in 
the Alliance. But even Signor Giolitti, whose 
pro-German sympathies were excessive, could 
not allow the Austrian argument. He replied 
to Count San Giuliano that such a war would 
not be a casus foederis, but executed by Aus- 
tria-Hungary on her own account. He said: 
"When no one thinks of attacking her she 
is not in a position of self-defence. You 
must convey this to Austria in the most formal 
way; and it is desirable that Germany should 
dissuade her from persisting in so highly dan- 
gerous an adventure." 

What Germany did we are not likely to be 
told; but war was staved off yet a while. 
Bulgaria had broken with Slavdom and 
Russia; to her everlasting shame she had 
villainously set upon Greeks and Serbians, 
getting well beaten by them, and trampled 
on by Rumania. Her king became the 
Sultan's friend, although the Turks had 
calmly walked back into Adrianople and 
stayed there. But Serbia, beleaguered still 
by Austrian intrigues, not given an outlet on 
either side, yet in two heroic wars a conqueror, 
would surely not cease to struggle on her own 
behalf, and that of Slavdom. Her people 
were the vanguard of a movement ever 



254 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

pressing on towards the West; they claimed 
Bosnia-Herzegovina; they signalled by public 
journalism, revolutionary societies, and their 
mere presence on the frontier, to the twenty- 
seven millions of Slavs held in bondage, 
frequently mishandled, by the German and 
Magyar minorities who ruled with unintel- 
ligent hauteur in Vienna and Buda-Pest. 

Well might these Berchtolds, Tiszas, Fuer- 
stenbergs, talk of a menace close at hand ! It 
is not to be denied. The analogy between 
Piedmont in 1858-1860 and Serbia since 1910 
is very striking. In both cases an armed 
champion, which could count on the sympathy 
of millions who thought themselves "unre- 
deemed," was standing at the gates of the prison. 
Germans and Magyars would not conjure away 
the menace by giving their Croatians, Slo- 
venes, Czechs, and the rest a genuine Home 
Rule. Ascendancy was the game; yes, even 
when "Trialism," with which Franz Ferdinand 
seemed to be coquetting, got its columns of 
advertisement in the newspapers. The "Drang 
nach Osten" never paused for a day. The 
Pan-German idea marched on. To annihilate 
Serbia, to bribe King Ferdinand with a scrap 
of Macedonia, to hustle the Greeks out of 
Salonica — these were steps foreseen, pre- 



LIGHTNING OUT OF THE EAST 255 

determined, in the moving programme to 
which Anatolia, scored through by the Bagh- 
dad Railway, gave pledge and prospect of 
success. Who could prevent it? There was 
only one Power strong enough to hinder a 
new-making of the world. Its name was 
Britain. 

The vision of a Bulgarian soldier, Major 
Atanasov, published immediately after Aus- 
tria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, 
throws these anticipations into a golden light. 
I must abridge, but I cannot pass over its 
salient features. "When Russia comes to 
Serbia's help," said Atanasov, "the European 
War will break out. Two great Alliances 
and two small groups in the Balkans will rush 
into conflict. The action of England will be 
decisive. Now Sir Edward Grey has made 
it clear that England does not see eye to eye 
with Russia in the Balkan problems. Even 
in European questions England is only par- 
tially in accord with Russia and France. In 
Parliament Sir Edward has affirmed her in- 
dependence of the Dual Alliance; she does 
not intend to support the Franco-Russian as- 
pirations. Therefore she will remain neutral. 
In the fields of battle will be seen Russia, 
France, Rumania, Serbia, Greece arrayed on 



256 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

one side; and the Triple Alliance with Bul- 
garia, Turkey, Sweden and Norway on the 
other. The second group will come out vic- 
torious. Turkey will assail southern Russia, 
the Scandinavians march on Petersburg, the 
Bulgarians fling themselves against Greeks 
and Serbs, the Albanians on Montenegro; 
and if need be, the Austro-Hungarians with 
ourselves will finish Rumania. Two great 
final campaigns will be fought: one near 
Odessa or Kieff, to overthrow the Russians; 
in the other the western German army, alone 
or combined with Italian forces, will execute 
a victorious march through France. In the 
naval actions following the Russian fleet will 
be destroyed in the Black Sea, the French by 
the German in the Atlantic; and the shores 
of France will be occupied by the triumphant 
Teutons." 

A brave fantasy, this of the Bulgarian Ma- 
jor Atanasov! It may appear to us incredible 
that he, or any man, should picture England 
as a still watcher from Shakespeare's cliff 
while the Teutonic, Austro-Hungarian, Bul- 
garo-Turk expeditions were thus resistlessly 
overrunning the nations of Europe; but he 
was not alone in his misconception. It is 
repeated with studied gentleness in Truth 



LIGHTNING OUT OF THE EAST 257 

about Germany — that official manifesto to 
which Prince von Billow, and Herr Ballin 
of the Hamburg-American line, set their 
names, with many others of like eminence. 
These meek-eyed disciples of Kultur say 
mournfully, "It was Germany's conviction 
that the sincerity of Britain's love for peace 
could be trusted." 

How beautiful a thing is trust! Britain 
had a Liberal Cabinet pledged against aggres- 
sion, as Major Atanasov rightly reports, with 
a passion for reducing naval and army esti- 
mates; it included a Sir Edward Grey, who 
could not imagine that there were wicked 
persons in rerum natura like Bernhardi, say- 
ing, "Our German people must be taught 
that the maintenance of peace never can or 
ought to be the goal of policy"; a Lord 
Haldane, whose spiritual home was on the 
banks of the Spree, and who believed that 
emulation of the better gifts was the very 
and only aim of Junkerdom; in short, it was 
a Cabinet which, on Mr. Lloyd George's 
solemn oath, did not and could not dream 
that war with Germany was possible. No 
wonder if Major Atanasov and all Bulgaria 
with him, as well as Europe at large, believed 
that the world might go to ruin, but Britain 



258 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

would keep the peace. At any rate Germany 
so believed, and Austria too; and in that 
faith unfeigned they made up their minds, 
for reasons military, political, economic, and 
dynastic, in view of the approaching end of 
Francis Joseph, and the growing strength, yet 
more to grow, of the French army and the 
Russian artillery, that war with Slavdom 
should be started not later than August, 1914. 
The evidence for this fact is cumulative 
and convincing. A pretext had to be found 
or made. The ways of Providence are mys- 
terious. So are the practices of autocratic 
governments. On Sunday, June 28, 1914, 
the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, with his mor- 
ganatic wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, was 
killed by a bomb and revolver shots in the 
streets of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, by 
two young Bosnians named Cabrinovich and 
Princip. Chance or design had furnished the 
Cabinet of Vienna with the pretext required. 
... I state things as they appeared at the 
time to those who had been long intent on 
the gathering South-Eastern storm. Unde- 
signed coincidences are always striking; and 
that preparations known to have been elabor- 
ately made, and warnings given in South 
Africa, in South America, in Canada, should 



LIGHTNING OUT OF THE EAST 259 

be followed at the strategic moment by a 
murder which would justify the most peaceful 
State in the severest measures, was a portent, 
divine or human, visible to the nations. 
Secret trials in camera do not elucidate mys- 
teries of this complexion. The miscreant 
Cabrinovich was not a Serbian, although he 
had obtained the instrument of his crime in 
Belgrade. He was a Bosnian, and the Aus- 
trian police looked upon him before the murder 
as a harmless sort of youth. Moreover Princip, 
the other assassin, also a Bosnian, acknowl- 
edged himself to have been for years an 
anarchist. Finally, the annexation in 1908 
of the two provinces had brought odium on 
the Archduke, who was believed to have 
encouraged Aerenthal, or even to have set 
him on doing it. 

These allegations might seem to cast no 
shadow of blame on the Belgrade Govern- 
ment, as truly, from that day to this, and 
although the Serbian archives fell later into 
Austrian hands, the foul deed has never been 
brought home to them by one shred of evi- 
dence. But the general connection of "Greater 
Serbian" schemes with this particular infamy 
was taken for granted. Sarajevo became "the 
city of the Great War." In an English trial 



260 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

for high treason the accused, as we saw when 
Sir Roger Casement was tried in London, 
would have the most able counsel to defend 
him, and cross-examination would probe the 
weak points of the indictment. Now the 
Serbian Government was on its trial, but 
before an Austrian court, where it could not 
get a hearing and could not cross-examine. 
What matter? superior power had allowed 
the undesigned coincidence. On July 27 a 
foreign diplomatist said to Dr. Dillon, who 
was then in Paris, "The German Emperor 
thinks the moment has come to strike a 
decisive blow." Mr. F. S. Oliver relates that 
on the margin of a document concerning the 
French and German preparations for war, 
supplied to him by a military friend at the 
end of July 1913, these observations, among 
others, were written: "N.B. Most important. 
The German Bill takes immediate effect. The 
French only takes effect in 1916. ... A year 
from now will be the critical time." To the 
day it proved so. 



CHAPTER XII 



Belgium saves Europe 



WHEN the Austrian Cabinet launched 
its ultimatum, like a torpedo, at 
Serbia, on July 23, 1914, it was aiming 
to destroy a greater thing — the independence 
and the conscience of Europe, bound in one. 
This was the felony for which the House 
of Habsburg must pay forfeit. Let us make 
our contention plain. In a powerful article 
from the pen of Signor Corradini, who created 
the National Italian party, and who leads it 
with singular ability, I read, "Delenda est 
Austria" ("Of Austria there must be an end"). 
The word is very sad in our hearing, on 
grounds not a few; yet when the headsman 
utters, "This I pronounce for doom," how 
can we gainsay him? Austria received from 
Providence, as long ago was pointed out, the 
task of reconciling German, Slav, and Magyar 
in defence of Christendom against the un- 
speakable Turk. This magnificent knight- 
hood Magyar and German have now sold in 

261 



262 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

HI 

exchange for their idle, showy, unjust, and 
essentially cruel exploiting of the patient Slav 
— their beast of burden, their packhorse, their 
scorn and sport and tribute-bearer during so 
many ages. The Apostolic crown of Hungary 
has been a pretence, the Imperial Roman a 
mockery. Entrenched in the heart of Europe, 
they have divided the nations which they 
misgoverned. And the Holy See may well 
rebuke the successor of St. Stephen for his 
aid and support of the Turkish power, which 
holds in durance Jerusalem and Nazareth. 

At long last, beaten times without number, 
and now smitten to servitude by aspiring 
Hohenzollern, these Habsburgs make them- 
selves the base instruments of a Power that 
uses, despises, and will cheat them, when they 
have served as its catspaw in the business of 
pulling Eastern chestnuts out of a roaring fire. 
What shame could be greater than the shame 
of Austria? But yet, "audi f acinus majoris 
abollae," listen to their most atrocious crime. 
They have loved and made a lie — the lie of an 
ultimatum to Serbia, whose terms, though 
fulfilled, they were resolute not to accept; 
while they knew, with crystalline clearness, 
that if Russia demurred to it, the whole of 
Europe would be flung into the seething 



BELGIUM SAVES EUROPE 263 

t > = 

cauldron where the nations, their men, riches, 
subsistence, and the very land that bore them, 
are all melting in a horrible conflict and con- 
fusion. It was Austria that began this devil's 
dance; and Austria, which is the House of 
Habsburg, should be handed over to the ex- 
ecutioner. It is a righteous doom which Si- 
gnor Corradini has registered, after the Allies 
had spoken it. 

I come back to the menaced independence 
of Europe, and to its conscience, already in 
danger. These were the great issues at stake 
in July 1914; not Serbia, whose complicity 
in the death of Franz Ferdinand, were it 
proved, could have been fitly punished without 
setting the world on fire. As Dr. Dillon 
reported on July 24, after the ultimatum had 
been dispatched, "No statesman in either half 
of the Empire holds King Peter's Government 
responsible for this revolting crime." The 
real question, he went on to point out, was 
one of pure force ; should Serbia break up the 
Dual Monarchy, or Austria, by imposing its 
will at Belgrade, put an end to the Slav peril 
in that direction. Serbia, like Bulgaria, held 
a key position ; hence the importance of both. 
However, Vienna wanted more — to be para- 
mount in the Balkans and get down to Salo- 



264 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

i — - 

nica. The ultimatum, then, made a feint of 
unreal language; and Europe, for a crowded 
week, from July 23 to July 31, 1914— the 
judgment week of the old order of things — 
held its "World's Debate" in a misleading 
form, as our Courts used to hear arguments 
about fictitious persons, John a Nokes and 
John a Stiles, by way of deciding vital matters 
of fortunes and estates. 

Hence came the defeat which Prussian 
chicanery was able to inflict on Sir Edward 
Grey, and thus to start the War on terms 
most favourable to Germany. Out of this 
net thrown over his head the British diplo- 
matist never got himself free. That England 
would not defend Serbia he declared immedi- 
ately; and that he was concerned only to 
preserve the general peace. But how? By 
proposing a Conference of the four friendly 
but neutral Powers — Britain, France, Italy, 
and Germany. This was not only to invite, 
but to secure, checkmate against his own side. 
The Kaiser could always evade a Conference; 
and he did so by merely marking time. It 
was the hour when England's decision was 
called for. England would not decide. 

England waited, while Russia by the mouth 
of M. Sazonov, and France by the cogent 



BELGIUM SAVES EUROPE 265 

representations of MM. Cambon in London 
and Berlin, showed with admirable lucidity 
that ' 'Austria's conduct was immoral and 
provocative"; that "she would never have 
taken such action had not Germany first been 
consulted"; that these things amounted to a 
virtual state of war, in which France would 
fulfil all the obligations entailed by her alliance 
with Russia; — and now, what did England 
mean to do? Sir G. Buchanan replied at 
Petersburg that we had "no direct interests 
in Serbia." M. Sazonov repeated with equal 
patience and insistence that it was not a 
Serbian question except in show; the Great 
War was at the doors. Still the correspon- 
dence rolled forward on John a Nokes and 
John a Stiles. The attitude of Britain was 
benevolent and negative; Sir Edward Grey 
continued, as he loved to do, his "temperate 
language," while war came down in a furious 
whirlwind. What did it all mean? 

It meant that a Liberal- Socialist Cabinet 
was saying, like Mr. W. J. Bryan at Wash- 
ington later, "There will be no war so long 
as I am in office; I do not want it; therefore 
it shall not be." Sir Edward Grey wrote as 
the Cabinet ordered. Alliance there was none 
compelling us to defend France; but, as we 



266 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

had in effect sent her fleet away to the 
Mediterranean, we pledged ourselves, when 
hostilities were on the point of breaking out, 
to protect her northern shores from an attack 
by Germany. Closer than that we would not 
go to realities, lest they should dissipate our 
dream of peace with a thunderclap. Never 
was a British Cabinet more innocent of offence 
towards its neighbour. But the neighbour 
was Attila. 

"Germany strikes," said Lord Roberts to a 
sneering world, "when Germany's hour has 
struck." Now was the hour, fixed according 
to good evidence, as we have learnt, at least 
a year previously; but almost chosen by the 
unfortunate victims themselves — their affairs 
in confusion, their preparations not made or 
far from complete, while England hung back 
on Quaker principles, and her politicians had 
been hurried by strikes, suffragettes, Ulster, 
and the rumours of civil war in Ireland, 
from crisis to crisis, none of which did they 
seem able to master. France, even to her 
best friends, offered a disquieting spectacle. 
Her Government was in commission. The 
President and Prime Minister were review- 
ing Russian troops in Petersburg, with work- 
men's strikes, engineered from the quarter 



BELGIUM SAVES EUROPE 267 

we know, growling behind them, on the 23rd 
of July, when the Austrian ultimatum was 
delivered at Belgrade. Had Mr. Asquith 
instructed Sir Edward Grey to tell the Kaiser 
plainly that England meant peace to be kept ; 
and that, if it were broken, she would do as 
in fact she did on the 4th of August immedi- 
ately following, she would have acted in her 
old spirit, not without happier consequences 
than were inevitable when a great nation 
looks on while its elected ministers play at 
blindman's buff. 

Sir Edward Grey's toned-down language 
made on the Kaiser just such an impression 
as men not so invincibly innocent would have 
predicted. He judged that England, having 
jogged along one mile, might be led to travel 
twain on the road of benevolent, that is to 
say, pro-German neutrality. Kicking aside 
Serbia with Sarajevo, which had helped him 
thus far, he ventured on, not one but several, 
"infamous proposals." Would his beloved 
British stand aside while he shattered France 
and appropriated her colonies? Would they 
let his armies pass through Belgium, whose 
integrity, after he had used her roads and 
railways, should be assured her, and good 
passage-money be promised her? No critic, 



268 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

— — — ■■■ — — ^— ■ ^— — — — * 

however severe, has charged the Liberal Cabi- 
net of July 1914 with high crimes and misde- 
meanours. They answered like English gentle- 
men, but in words too mild, and still hugging 
their neutrality, their "freedom of action." 
Speaking off book, Sir Edward at last warned 
the charming Prince Lichnowski that, if 
France were attacked, the Kaiser would do 
well not to reckon on Britain's folded arms. It 
is a proof how little the Germans feared this 
pacific Government that so gentle a caution 
should have flashed into the Prince's eyes a 
wonder never felt before. But this alarming 
view, though telegraphed to the Wilhelm- 
strasse, never reached the Kaiser. He put a 
deadly question in Paris; he sent, on July 31, 
an ultimatum to his friend the Tsar. And on 
August 1 he declared war against Russia. 

But even on that day of August the Cabinet 
refused to make common cause with France. 
Posterity will not believe it. Britain, as repre- 
sented by her Government, was suffering from 
an agony of indecision. The Stock Exchange 
was closed; the Bank rate went up to 10 per 
cent.; and people have talked ever since of 
that August "Black Saturday." In compari- 
son with what might have been, had the 
Cabinet gone on debating but not concluding, 



BELGIUM SAVES EUROPE 269 

these financial earthquakes were of no account. 
Like the Admiralty, our then Government 
was "organised for peace." It had no military 
sense whatever, any more than it had an 
Imperial outlook. It was a meeting of Town 
Councillors presiding in the House of Com- 
mons. By rare good fortune the Tory leaders 
in London, Mr. Balfour and Mr. Bonar Law, 
translated the European peril in terms of a 
message that signified, "If you will not de- 
clare war on behalf of France and Belgium, 
we will turn you out." The spell was broken. 
But something grander than party manoeuvres 
now rose upon the scene, dazzling mankind 
with light of another sphere. While Britain 
was hesitating to save Europe, the little nation 
of Belgium stood forth in defence of its 
honour and independence. Serbia was not to 
be the champion. Belgium faced Germany. 

Belgium, a Catholic country, modern and 
democratic, with a 'King and a Constitution, 
"Le roi, la loi, la liberte," drew the eyes of 
Europe from the Danube towards its historic 
battlefields, where the World's Debate had 
been, over and over again, decided. To per- 
sist in my metaphor of light, suddenly a rift 
appeared in the war-clouds ; the heavens broke 
open to their highest; and we were gazing 



270 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

into fathomless depths of ether. The South- 
Eastern problem dropped out of sight for 
England; we had discovered where our duty 
called us. To begin a European conflict be- 
cause Serbia had provoked Austria-Hungary, 
and was likely to undergo penalties brought 
on her head by guilty deeds, would never have 
been allowed by the British Parliament or 
people. Yet such seemed to be the problem, 
so long as Vienna kept hammering at retribu- 
tion for the crime of Serajevo. Besides, it 
can unhappily never be forgotten that trage- 
dies of an Oriental ferocity had cast a gloom 
over the Konak of Belgrade; and that, in 
consequence, Serbia with its Court lay for 
years excommunicate from the West. The 
claims and rights of Belgium were perfect 
before the Law of Nations. Some Divine 
Power might have kept her in reserve — and 
why not boldly say that so it was? — for the 
clear demonstration of justice and of the 
Allied cause, which, after all, was free from 
deceit and ambition, as the wide range of 
documents' now accessible proves convinc- 
ingly. Belgium, then, was a test and crucial 
experiment, simple as the elements of law 
and fact on which its defence rested. The 
"matter of Britain" could at once be taken 



BELGIUM SAVES EUROPE 271 

out of sophistical peace-wranglings. Even 
the Cabinet saw its way to a decision. 

The case was this. By treaties of 1839 and 
1870, to which all the Great Powers, including 
Prussia, had set their hands, the Belgian 
kingdom enjoyed perpetual neutrality. The 
obligation laid upon Europe was never to 
violate this zone of peace; while on the Bel- 
gians it was incumbent to protect their bounds 
from foreign intrusion with all their resources. 
France had no temptation to invade a country 
serving thus, after the manner of a bastion, 
where she lay exposed to attack from Ger- 
many. But the German General Staff, on 
their principles, took the opposite view; and, 
as may be read in Bernhardi's volume on The 
Next War, they laid their plans accordingly. 
Moreover, great strategic railways had been 
carried up to the Belgian frontier, which could 
have no other purpose than the transport of 
men and munitions on a vast scale in the 
direction of Liege. These things were mani- 
fest to all men. Warnings, too, came, though 
inconveniently late, which led to a secret 
session of Parliament and the introduction 
of national service, little as democracy in Bel- 
gium favoured it. Of this situation Dr. 
Sarolea, whose knowledge is derived at first 



272 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

hand from the authorities, will furnish the 
most persuasive summary. Nothing can be 
more certain than that the Belgian Govern- 
ment, and his Majesty King Albert, had but 
one desire: to be left in their neutrality by all 
the belligerents. 

And, as I said, France could only wish the 
same. Her defences on that side resembled, 
from the nature of the country, fortifications 
on a billiard table. Great Britain had an 
overpowering interest in Antwerp (and, if she 
had known it, in Zeebriigge, the insignificant 
port of Bruges) ; but she would best secure it 
by the absolute exemption of that great mart 
and trade-centre from the storms of war. So 
true is this reflection that not until months 
had passed did it occur to the German factory 
of fiction to bring against this country the 
charge of intending somehow to occupy Bel- 
gian territory. Such lies are like the father 
that begot them, gross Falstaffian inventions. 
Had the Prussian Chancellor dreamt of any- 
thing similar, he would never, on July 29, 
1914, have proposed to Sir Edward Bunsen 
by England's good leave to march German 
hosts through Belgium into France. This 
one observation disposes of the stories, fabri- 



BELGIUM SAVES EUROPE 273 

1 . f 

cated too late, of Belgian conspiracies against 
the Kaiser with perfidious Albion. 

We will now look into the general situation 
more closely, as its drift and logic were summed 
up by Sir Edward Grey in dispatches on 
July 29 and 30, when Britain's negative was 
changing under stress of events to a categorical 
affirmative, and the future of all nations was 
determined. From these resolutely simple 
documents we gather as follows. The problem 
of war and peace offered two aspects, an East- 
ern and a Western, Germany being the assail- 
ant on both fronts. The Eastern question had 
become a dispute between Austria and Serbia, 
leading up to the larger one of Teuton against 
Slav, each intent on winning supremacy in the 
Balkans. Great Britain would take a hand in 
neither. But the Western concerned Germany 
and France. What then? Sir Edward wrote 
to Sir F. Bertie in Paris these remarkable 
words: "If Germany became involved and 
France became involved, we had not made up 
our minds what we should do; it was a case 
that we should have to consider. . . . We were 
free from engagements, and we should have 
to decide what British interests required us 
to do." Astonishing! For ever since King 



274 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

Edward's journeyings on the errand of ending 
our splendid isolation, this question was staring 
the successive British Premiers in the face. 

But while Sir Edward in London was 
"considering," the German Chancellor, "just 
returned from Potsdam," was helping him and 
his colleagues to "make up their minds." 
What Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, the 
Kaiser's mouthpiece, proposed that same eve- 
ning, the 29th, and how it was welcomed by 
the British Ministry, we read in Sir Edward's 
reply of July 30 to Sir E. Goschen. Would 
England stand aside, while French colonies 
were taken, and France was beaten but not 
farther dismembered? Would we bargain 
away "whatever obligations or interest we 
had as regarded the neutrality of Belgium"? 
Would we bind ourselves to Germany by a 
"general agreement" to be neutral ourselves? 

These were the Kaiser's requisitions. They 
spared us the insult — and that is curiously 
characteristic on both sides — of hinting at an 
equivalent for our betrayal of Europe. But 
the German Chancellor was so — shall I say 
obtuse or adroit? — as to inquire if we should 
continue to be neutral, while he was in the 
very act of violating neutrality. Sir Edward 
Grey answered, not by publishing these "in- 



BELGIUM SAVES EUROPE 275 

famous proposals" to the world, as Pitt or 
Palmerston would have done, but in a mild, 
though firm staccato. "It would be a disgrace 
to us," he wrote, "to make this bargain with 
Germany at the expense of France, a disgrace 
from which the good fame of this country 
would never recover." And "we could not en- 
tertain that bargain either," by which Belgium 
should be left to its fate. We could not tie 
our hands by a "future general neutrality." 
But if Germany would work with us to pre- 
serve the peace of Europe, Sir Edward Grey 
declared that he would "promote some arrange- 
ment to which Germany could be a party, by 
which she could be assured that no aggressive 
or hostile policy would be pursued against her 
or her allies by France, Russia, and ourselves, 
jointly or separately." Thus far the voice of 
England spoke, of that England 

"Whose white investments figure innocence, 
The dove and very blessed spirit of peace." 

But they prove it also. I stake the defence 
of the Allies on Sir Edward Grey's transpar- 
ent candour, which showed to the fire-eaters of 
the German General Staff how little an attack 
was contemplated on the Fatherland which 
they have since delivered over to blood and 
ruin. Still, though Britain's Foreign Secretary 



276 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

m i ii 

had gently waved aside their ruffian demands, 
they concluded that so good a Christian would 
never fight; and they fixed a term for the 
invasion of Belgium. The hundred threads 
of intrigue and preparation had run together 
into this enterprise, so facile and prompt, as 
they believed, of execution, giving them a 
short cut into the heart of France and an easy 
road to Paris. The War would be over in 
seven weeks, about as long as the campaign 
which subdued Austria, July- August 1866. 
These were the confident anticipations of 
Berlin. 

The last day of July 1914, and of the old 
Europe we have known, dawned in clear sun- 
shine. But England's heart was moved, and 
the heart of her people, as the trees of the 
wood are moved with the wind. On the war- 
anvil Thor's hammer struck until it rang again. 
Germans, Russians, French, were on march 
in myriads to the frontiers. Krieg-mobil was 
everywhere in those lands the order of the 
day. I have already mentioned the German 
ultimatum to the Tsar. Still Sir Edward 
flew his doves of peace all round, but kept his 
hands free. Offers from Berlin to guarantee 
(oh, soothing word!) the integrity of France 
and her colonies were the last gestures of that 



BELGIUM SAVES EUROPE 277 

hypnotism which longed to keep Britain in 
her magic sleep. On Saturday evening, about 
five p.m., Germany declared war on Russia. 

The throbbing nerve of the situation was 
now Belgium. Our unwearied Secretary had 
asked for assurances from France and Prussia 
that they would respect its sacred character. 
France gave hers at once ; the Prussian Secre- 
tary, Von Jagow, must consult his master. 
Then, on the system of double entry familiar 
to us from instances already cited, the Minister 
of Germany at Brussels was reiterating on 
Sunday, August 2, his pledge that the Belgian 
Government need fear no violence, while an 
ultimatum was flying towards him, which he 
delivered with shame a couple of hours later, 
requiring that Belgium should "cease to be 
a nation and become a thoroughfare." If she 
refused, war with its consequences would follow 
without delay. "The choice laid on Belgium," 
I wrote in January 1915, "was to lose her 
independence, or to join in a treacherous 
side-blow at France, which would mean that 
country's downfall. And Belgium stood alone. 
Her attitude was heroic, for her decision 
was instantly taken. From that moment the 
German General Staff condemned her to death 
by burning. . . . Belgium would not unlock 



278 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

i 

her gates; they must be forced open. The 
cannon thundering against Liege announced 
that the greatest crime of modern history had 
entered on its first hour." 

King Albert appealed on Monday, August 3, 
to Great Britain as signatory of the Treaties 
of 1839 and 1870, to "safeguard the integrity 
of Belgium." Alas! we were not ready; but 
we could respect our plighted word. Historical 
scenes followed in the British Parliament. 
Any large prophetic vision of the European 
crisis and all it held of revolution, of new 
creation, was not to be expected in the House 
of Commons; but a certain practical sense, 
and loyalty to our engagements, bound these 
afternoons to the splendid and stately times 
of the Long Parliament. 

For it was the same dispute, carried beyond 
our shores to a world lying in thought and 
manners far from us. Instead of the in- 
violable Five Members a nation craved its 
rights at the hands of this High Court, A 
greater than Charles I by number of subjects, 
wealth stored up, armies raised and trained, 
fleets called into being, diplomacy world-wide, 
and spies ubiquitous, came to fetch his victims 
with a truculent band of incendiaries, woman- 
ravishers, priest-slayers — the "Furious Host" 



BELGIUM SAVES EUROPE 279 

riding to victory; and he was met by a calm 
statement in the Commons' House of Britain. 
Her Fleet alone was ready; it had begun 
its watch in the North Sea. The riddle of 
the sands would now receive its solution. 
Belgium had cleared the air. For autocracy, 
calling itself necessity, knew no law. 

"Phrases," I said in the article from which 
I have borrowed, "soon to become immortal, 
were trembling on the lips of Prussian 
ministers — 'a scrap of paper,' 'time is our 
asset,' 'necessity has no law,' 'we must hack 
our way through.'" And the confession is 
on record, as in enduring granite, which on 
August 4, 1914, the Chancellor made: "Our 
troops have occupied Luxemburg, and perhaps 
[but he knew it] are already on Belgian soil. 
Meine Herren, that is contrary to the dictates 
of International Law. . . . We knew, however, 
that France stood ready for the invasion [this 
the speaker did not know, for it was not true] . 
France could wait, but we could not wait . . . 
so we were compelled to override the just 
protest of the Luxemburg and Belgian Govern- 
ments. The wrong — I speak openly — that we 
are committing we will endeavour to make 
good as soon as our military goal has been 
reached." 



280 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

This was Charles I, muttering in his cloak 
an apology for invading the Commons, his 
armed gang at the doors, while the members 
rounded in his ears, "Privilege, privilege!" 
To-day, May 5, 1917, I read that after dis- 
cussion in the Reichstag the German Govern- 
ment proposes to break up Belgium (whose 
motto is, L 'union fait la force) into Flemish 
and Walloon, province against province, but 
with a Prussian general to hold them well in 
hand. As King Albert would not put his 
country up to auction, it is to be sold in 
lots. The methods of autocracy are indeed 
convincing. 

But by her sheer and simple heroism Bel- 
gium had saved the conscience of Europe. 
She would save its independence also, as 
events were about to prove in the face of an 
astonished and admiring world. 

On Tuesday, August the Fourth — a day, as 
we have seen, memorable in the French annals 
of 1789 — England despatched to Berlin an 
ultimatum, the object of which was to secure 
the Belgian kingdom from German attack. 
It was too late. At seven o'clock Sir E. 
Goschen received his passports. At midnight, 
Berlin time, our war began. The guardian 
of the freedom of Europe had been compelled 



BELGIUM SAVES EUROPE 281 

by Belgium's loyalty to her pledges, and by 
Germany's disregard of her honour, to take 
up arms against the House of Hohenzollern. 
Not Shakespeare himself could have devised 
a more perfect situation, or have kept the 
respective characters so true to themselves. 



CHAPTER XIII 



The Triumph of "Kultur" 



NOTHING is so difficult to subdue," 
said Aristotle, "as injustice in arms." 
Kultur, or mechanism made perfect, was now 
to give the world assurance of a man — of 
millions of men — turned out by its training 
on Belgium and Europe. "Time is the Ger- 
man asset," replied Herr von Jagow, when 
Sir E. Goschen implored him in England's 
name to respect Prussia's own sacred word. 
And the Chancellor, Herr von Bethmann- 
Hollweg, called the treaty which guaranteed 
Belgian neutrality "a scrap of paper" — the 
winged word that flew round Europe, and is 
flying still. Injustice, armed as never before, 
crying out that it could not spare the time 
to be just, fell upon Liege, and on August 
20, 1914, entered Brussels in triumph. The 
Prussian Guard, marching with its high and 
ridiculous "goose-step," went up by the Cathe- 
dral of Ste.-Gudule, along by the Place Royale, 
and so to the park and palace — looking tran- 

282 



THE TRIUMPH OF "KULTUR" 283 

quillity itself under the bright heavens — from 
which a hurricane of fire over the land had 
forced King Albert to withdraw. Europe felt 
the wound to its honour. It could not protect 
Belgium. And we, who remembered delightful 
days in the fair city and the royal park, were 
desolate. Now was the second half of Aris- 
totle's denunciation to be fulfilled. All the 
world should see how the nation that abused 
its "prudence and valour" would be "the 
most wicked, the most cruel, the most lustful, 
and most gluttonous being imaginable." 

A new word rang through the air, Schreck- 
lichkeit. It was the German equivalent of a 
French Convention formula, "Terror the order 
of the day." My first suspicion of the coming 
portent was stirred by the brutal handling of 
Tirlemont, a place dear to friends of mine, and 
associated in my wanderings with flowers in 
bloom. But soon we had to recite a chaplet 
of sorrow — the rosary which, beginning with 
Liege, took in Vise, Aerschot, Termonde, 
Louvain, Malines, Dinant, Roulers, Courtrai, 
Ypres. To them we added Alost, Lierre, 
Mons, Namur. Such was the object-lesson 
in burning, pillage, slaughter, rape, and havoc, 
with details not to be uttered, given deliberately 
and with scientific precision, by the German 



284 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

i 

invaders, to every people under heaven. The 
"War-Book" ordered it: "A war conducted 
with energy cannot be directed merely against 
the combatants of the Enemy State, and the 
positions they occupy. It will and must 
seek to destroy the total moral and material 
resources of that State." 

Thus Von Moltke: "All should be attacked 
— not the military alone, but finances, railways, 
means of subsistence, even the prestige of the 
enemy's Government." And Bismarck: "The 
nation must be sickened of the war. Leave 
them nothing but their eyes to weep with." 
When the grim Chancellor was entreated not 
to starve Paris into surrender, he laughed the 
proposal to scorn, and said: "I wonder that 
any of the pretty French babies are still alive 
inside the lines." The "War-Book" too smiles 
at any one who should try to put the brake 
on "the unrestricted and reckless application 
of all the available means for the conduct of 
hostilities." There is no such thing as a "law 
of war"; there is only "fear of reprisals." 
Most certain it is, after a thousand days of 
horror, that not accident but policy made the 
Germans in Belgium "stable their horses in 
churches, destroy municipal buildings, defile 
the hearth, and bombard cathedrals." Body 



THE TRIUMPH OF "KULTUR" 285 

and soul, the people were to be broken. Name- 
less outrages, reported but impossible of de- 
scription, with incendiarism repeated from end 
to end of this brave, this devastated country, 
were done by command. "As our princes tell 
us, so we do," said Heine. The Kaiser vio- 
lated, burnt, and ruined Belgium, like some 
monstrous Hindu god with ten thousand arms, 
each bearing a lighted brand. He, as if alone, 
as if omnipotent. 

The fate of Louvain shocked humanity. 
Then the whole of Belgium seemed to be 
wrapt in a fiery cloud. Next the hail of 
projectiles struck beautiful Rheims; and its 
cathedral, the French Westminster Abbey, 
was ruthlessly dealt with like a great lady 
whom a band of drunken ruffians had seized 
and stripped. As the country and its treasures, 
so the people. For months the system of 
terror went on, leaving no humiliation of de- 
fenceless men, women, and children untried. 
Seven millions of Belgians would have starved 
to death if English and American relief had 
not come between them and famine. On the 
fall of Antwerp at least half a million fled 
across the border into Holland. We sheltered 
in this country more than one hundred thousand 
homeless fugitives, many of whom had seen 



286 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

their towns and villages set on fire with in- 
flammable disks and grenades by the German 
soldiery. 

These things were not freaks of violence; 
and the writers who at that time apolo- 
gised for the General Staff as unable to 
prevent them, may now read — with remorse, 
I hope, as they read — the instructions issued 
to regiments falling back in France on the 
Hindenburg line, that they should utterly 
make a desert of the country they are giving 
up. How scrupulously the work has been 
carried into effect, our advancing troops bear 
witness. No German authority dreams of 
apologising for it. Belgium in 1914, and 
France in 1917, show the consistent logic 
of destruction, applied to everything in the 
doomed area, which is Germany's rule in war. 
It spares neither the past nor the present; 
and, so far as in it lies, there shall be no future 
possible where it has been compelled to loosen 
its grip. Such is Kultur in action, an armed 
and aggressive doctrine. The German "War- 
Book" is the only Bible it recognises. 

A "doctrine of devils ;" to which the strongest 
human motives have added poisonous flames. 
For Belgium, by three weeks of resistance, 
had thrown the Prussian plan out of gear, 



THE TRIUMPH OF "KULTUR" 287 

allowed time for a British expedition to land 
on the coast of France, and shown that the 
Germans, though each might be "fierce as ten 
Furies, terrible as Hell," were not invincible. 
Belgium was conquered up to the sands of 
Dunkirk; its hero-king had but a margin by 
the sea to call his own. But in the fourth 
week of August French and British troops, 
though hard beset, and the French badly beaten 
at Charleroi, were fighting the immortal rear- 
ward action to be known in history as the 
glorious Retreat from Mons. The War, said 
experts in strategy, long ere its thunder broke 
into fire-floods, cannot be a long one; Europe 
has no reserves of force equal to those lengthy, 
dawdling campaigns of old time. It will be 
decided in the West; and about a month will 
see the battles over which must determine the 
issue. At Berlin the General Staff held pretty 
much an identical view ; and the Seven Weeks 
of 1866 were freely cited. 

Now let us reckon how many days elapsed 
between July 23, when Count Berchtold sent 
that arrogant, false ultimatum to Belgrade, 
and September 10, when the Battles of the 
Marne were ending. The number is forty- 
nine, just seven weeks. Nothing, it seemed 
at first, could stop the "march of the Huns." 



288 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

On their way the north-eastern fortresses of 
France fell as at the sound of a rushing, mighty 
wind. Our little army, under General French, 
fought heroically day and night from August 
23; but still, at the word of General Joffre, 
it kept on retreating. The modern Huns 
swept forward in the track of Attila (June 
451), whom the Kaiser had taken as his model, 
and of whom we read that he "sacked most 
of the cities in Belgic Gaul." Over the "Cata- 
launian fields," or plains of Champagne, they 
drove ahead, until they reached Meaux, within 
twenty miles of Paris, and the booming of 
their great guns could be heard in the suburbs 
at Vincennes. On September 3 the Govern- 
ment transferred itself to Bordeaux. Nearly 
one million people, it is said, left the Capital, 
and we were resigning our minds to its fall. 
In imagination we saw the Prussian Uhlans 
riding along once more past the Arc de 
Triomphe and the Champs Elysees into the 
Place de la Concorde. On that same day in 
Rome a new pope was elected, who took the 
name of Benedict XV, and to whose coming 
reign legend attached the prophetic words, 
"Religio depopulata," or "Religion laid waste." 
They were to have striking fulfilment; but the 
Huns would not enter Paris. 



THE TRIUMPH OF "KULTUR" 289 

r , 3 

For now General von Kluck made his turn- 
ing move south-east before the French lines. 
General Joffre called up his Sixth Army; 
General French, not annihilated, smote rudely 
on the Germans at hand; the second decisive 
Battle of the "Catalaunian fields" began on 
Sunday, September 6, and spread over one 
hundred miles. That ancient first battle 
against Attila (June 25, 451), says the histor- 
ian Jornandes, was "fierce, various, obstinate, 
and bloody, without parallel in past ages; he 
that saw not this wonder had seen nothing." 
But the second eclipsed all hitherto fought, not 
so much in magnitude as in consequences. It 
lasted with vicissitudes during four clear days, 
of which September 8 — the Feast of Our 
Lady's Nativity — beheld the German right 
defeated and falling back under pressure of 
the English and French combined. Next day, 
the 9th, brought high winds, drenching rains, 
and the critical moment of the whole war. It 
ended in our favour. On Thursday, September 
10, 1914, "the battle of the Marne had to 
all intents been won by the Allies, and the 
engagement became a drive." 

By Saturday the 12th the Germans were 
taking shelter in the entrenched positions on 
the Aisne which they had previously got ready. 



290 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

Their forward movement came to an end. 
The new line was one of the strongest defences 
in Europe. But the Great Offensive had been 
met and broken. The thing which German 
strategists, bred on Moltke's principles, dreaded 
more than all, was now to be their portion — 
the parallel battle in the trenches from the 
borders of Switzerland to the North Sea. 
The Polish Jew of Warsaw, J. S. Bloch, had 
so far back as 1898 described such a "line 
of battle in the earth"; he predicted quite 
accurately that the "breaking of frontier 
defences," an operation hitherto unknown, 
would be required in the war of the future; 
and that to do it "without a whole series of 
battles is inconceivable." He concluded that 
there would be no conclusion, but a stalemate. 
This, after nearly three years of fighting on 
the French, Italian, Turkish, and Russian 
fronts, remains to be seen. But when the 
Allies and the Germans had raced on till both 
armies were halted on the edge of the North 
Sea, neither outflanking the other, it became 
clear that, by losing the battle of the Marne, 
his Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm had lost all 
chance of winning the War. Time, I say, 
which had been the German asset, passed over 
thereupon to the Allies; they could marshal 



THE TRIUMPH OF "KULTUR" <*91 

and employ their inexhaustible resources, while 
the Central Empires underwent a gradually- 
tightening blockade by land as well as by sea. 
From henceforth autocracy stood at bay; the 
King's Evil was fighting as a forlorn hope in 
its last defences. Few, perhaps, realised that 
the experts were justified, and that the out- 
come of the War, however long it might be, 
was already certain. 

I borrow from Goethe the phrase and fact 
of "elective affinities." They exist between 
nations no less than individuals; and now 
they were making their influence more and 
more felt. Free men drew close to free men — 
slave- States to slave- States. Of the great 
free alliance, it was naturally the Common- 
wealths of the British Empire that set the 
example. They rallied to the Mother Country 
— Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders; 
South Africa was grateful and passionately 
loyal ; India broke into a fever of enthusiasm for 
the British Raj, whose Emperor and Empress 
it had beheld on lofty thrones at Delhi. The 
British Islands were united as never before. 
On August 3, when the die was cast, Mr. 
John Redmond, rising in Parliament as his 
country's leader, held out the right hand of 
friendship to England. It was heartily taken, 



292 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

But a timid Cabinet, which had little if any 
sense of what the Irish people could do 
beyond the walls of that House, throughout 
the Empire and in the United States, left 
Home Rule a dead letter on the Statute- 
Book. In due time the ministers would reap 
their reward in blood and fire — the rising of 
Eastertide 1916, the conflagration of Dublin's 
finest street, and the fierce hatred of "Sinn 
Fein," bringing down with a crash all that 
Nationalists and Liberals had patiently built 
up. 

In September 1914 the fair dream of 
reconciliation smiled on us all. And Irish 
soldiers, Irish regiments outdid and distanced 
the traditional fame of their reckless daring. 
General French was an Irishman; the splen- 
dours of the Irish Guards during the retreat 
from Mons and in the battles of the Marne 
took all eyes. By and by the Irish at Gallipoli, 
with their Australian kinsfolk, became a world's 
wonder for boldness and endurance. What 
was it that cast an evil spell over these most 
rare achievements and the country to which 
they were due? It was the survival termed 
"Ascendancy," which is nothing else than a 
kind of Junkerdom, flourishing in Ireland still 
because Dublin Castle remains its last trench. 



THE TRIUMPH OF "KULTUR" 293 

I cannot pursue the subject. A mightier voice 
than that of any private writer or speaker 
would give it resonance before the War was 
done. We shall hear that voice in the next 
chapter. 

Among the nations abroad, Italy was un- 
clasping, link by link, the fetters of the Triplice, 
and would join her true Allies at an anxious 
moment in 1915. She had reft Tripoli from 
Turkey by force of arms; her enemy at all 
times was Austria. The Cabinet of Rumania 
would be guided by Italy. Our ancient friend- 
ship with Portugal secured that Republic. We 
could not expect Holland or the Scandinavian 
Powers to join us. The Greeks loved freedom, 
but their royal house, bound by ties of blood 
to the Kaiser, would never give M. Venizelos 
a chance to lead the nation. And the mind 
of Bulgaria, which Ferdinand of Orleans ruled, 
we know well from disclosures, official and 
private, was in favour of alliance with Vienna. 
When Turkey, after exhausting the patience 
of our ambassador, sold herself to the Kaiser, 
not for any exorbitant price, Bulgaria's position 
was like that of a director on a financial board 
who has the casting-vote in his pocket. She 
stood between East and West — neutral, but 
calling out, "What offers?" She could supply 



294 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

1 

the missing section of the Orient line from 
Berlin to Constantinople and on to Baghdad. 
To complete the chain, or to leave it hanging 
loose in two parts, lay within her choice. For 
months her parrot-cry to the West was, 
"Macedonia, give me Macedonia." The West, 
so we believed, would have made a present 
to Sofia, as the Serbians cried out bitterly, 
of what did not belong to them, if King 
Ferdinand would but come in. Nevertheless, 
no bargain was struck by Sir Edward Grey. 
He was not the kind of man to deal with 
"King Fox." To those who have looked 
sharply into the "aspirations of Bulgaria" 
there can seem little question that, once Mace- 
donia had been surrendered, the ci-devant 
Austrian officer would have kept, not his word 
but his prize, and held out a trusty hand to 
Vienna on one side, to Stamboul on the other. 
When chaffering was in vain, he declared 
against the Allies. 

Belgium offers a fine contrast to Bulgaria. 
Chosen by the Power which was guiding men 
through storm and suffering on the upward 
way, Belgium, as the moral centre of the 
World's Debate, shone with increasing lustre. 
She had the rare felicity of possessing a king 
who was of heroic mould, and a cardinal who 



THE TRIUMPH OF "KULTUR" 295 

was at once a patriot, a scholar, and a saint. 
These are lofty terms; but none less exalted 
will describe a tragic situation where these 
illustrious actors lived so grandly up to the 
parts assigned them. I have now, for the 
purpose of this argument, to quote the very 
words of King Albert's immortal reply to the 
aggressor: "The attack on her independence 
with which the German Government threatens 
Belgium, would constitute a flagrant violation 
of the Law of Nations. No strategic interest 
can justify the violation of Right. If the 
Belgian Government accepted the proposals 
which have been notified to it, it would sac- 
rifice the nation's honour and betray its duties 
towards Europe." Such was the Royal defi- 
ance to iniquity. 

Amid growing horror, civilised peoples had 
been taught, as I described it in the Dublin 
Review of January 1915, the "Lesson of 
Louvain." It showed them German Kultur 
doing its work of perfect mechanism, with a 
heart as hard as the rock from which it was 
hewn. Another lesson, and of a nobler cast, 
awaited the invaders themselves. Motley, the 
American historian, writing on The Rise of 
the Dutch Republic, has these words : "Peaceful 
in their pursuits, phlegmatic by temperament, 



296 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

the Netherlander were yet the most belliger- 
ent and excitable population of Europe." On 
both sides of the Scheldt that witness remains 
true. The Belgians would not give in. Though 
Liege, Namur, Brussels, and Antwerp had 
fallen; though Ghent, and Bruges, and Os- 
tend were in the enemy possession; though 
in combats without ceasing, against formidable 
odds, the Belgian Army had poured out its 
blood on the stricken field until more than 
half of its men were killed, wounded, or taken, 
the remnant fought down to the shores of 
the sea undaunted. King Albert raised and 
equipped a second host which, by the side of 
our soldiers, won glory in the victories of the 
Yser, Ypres, and Calais. The King's "un- 
conquerable soul," as he led his troops to the 
long campaigns where a foe was driving at 
them in rage and hate, but always found them 
steady as of old, inspired poets and draughts- 
men, stirred the admiration of distant Amer- 
ica, made of the Belgian flag the banner of 
freedom. Here was a King indeed. 

With him stood forward the Cardinal, a 
figure not less heroic. When Gibbon is telling 
how Attila, ravaging Gaul in 451, laid siege 
to Orleans, he dwells on "the pastoral dili- 



THE TRIUMPH OF "KULTUR" 297 

gence of Anianus, a bishop of primitive sanctity 
and consummate prudence," who "exhausted 
every art of religious policy to support their 
courage till the arrival of the expected suc- 
cours." In Cardinal Mercier we shall not seek 
any politic art except a manly firmness; but, 
allowing for the Gibbonian style, these words, 
while describing the ancient prelate who saved 
Orleans, may be well adapted to this un- 
doubtedly great man in the like circumstances. 
He could not, it is true, protect Malines, his 
primatial See, or its imposing Cathedral, from 
the modern hordes. They burnt and slew all 
round, as they would. But Cardinal Mercier 
stayed among his people, and was not to be 
removed. He became the voice of Belgium. 
He spoke as the Catholic Faith guided him 
to speak. And he smote Kultur with his 
pastoral staff in the sight of the world. 

We who had seen and heard him at Canter- 
bury, in 1897, when we were celebrating the 
seventh centenary of St. Augustine's landing at 
Ebbsfleet, knew what manner of man he was. 
The Cardinal did, indeed, journey to Rome in 
the last days of the sorrowful month of August 
1914, just after Louvain had passed through 
the fire. The late Pope, Pius X, was dead. 



298 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

He expired on August 20, the day when the 
Germans entered Brussels; and grief at the 
coming on of war which Austria would not 
delay at his bidding hastened the saintly old 
man's death. When Benedict XV was elected 
the Cardinal went back to his flock and his 
prison. With New Year the storm burst on 
him. In answer to questions from his clergy 
the Primate of Belgium sent out a charge so 
clear and telling that the German authorities 
"tore up the Pastoral, fined the printer, and 
put the highest ecclesiastic in the land under 
a guard." The Kaiser would have deported 
him to Germany, as he did M. Max, the burgo- 
master of Brussels, had not men of all creeds 
and parties uttered their protest. Rome was 
deeply indignant ; the Holy Father made ready 
to act. Then the German Emperor denied all 
his satellites had done. It was a Christian 
principle to avoid bloodshed; "whatever might 
lead even indirectly to agitations and risings," 
he observed to the Vatican, "would neces- 
sitate severe measures on the part of the 
(German) army." This warning, if we trans- 
late it into plain language, threatened rapine 
and slaughter unless the Cardinal kept silence. 
But he has never kept silence when duty 



THE TRIUMPH OF "KULTUR" 299 

called; and his Pastorals have given Belgium 
new courage, while they are circulated on 
both sides of the Atlantic, and admired 
wherever they are read. 

I gave my view of the episode on February 
12, 1915, and will ask leave to quote its 
conclusion here. (Catholic Times, "The Un- 
just Aggressor in Belgium.") 

"Yes," I wrote, "Cardinal Mercier has 
committed an unpardonable crime. He said 
to the invader: 'You have robbed, plundered, 
murdered, committed sacrilege; but all these 
things, for which I give you chapter and 
verse, do not make you liege lord of Belgium.' 
To the people he said: 'Be still; your King 
commands it. Leave the fighting to our 
army and our allies. But remember that 
you are not subjects of any sovereign, or 
bound by any Constitution, except your own. 
To the enemy you owe nothing. Look 
forward. Belgium will be free once more.' 
These noble words have won the battle of 
right by their mere enunciation. They re- 
duced the German forces, military, judicial, 
imperial, to the moral impotence of an earth- 
quake or a breaking of the dykes. Teutons 
might storm, lay waste, set the world ablaze; 



300 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

what had all that violence to do with the 
rights of the nation settled in its own land? 
A soldier suppresses the Pastoral, interns the 
Primate. Has he any right to do either? 
Right, none at all; a strong hand, with 
howitzers and other weapons of death, we 
see that he has. The Cardinal, an incarnate 
figure of Justice, stands over against him, 
erect, unharmed. Sheer force on one side, 
absolute Right on the other. That is Bel- 
gium's reply to 'Deutschland iiber Alles.' 
With it begins a better time for Europe and 
the world. Kneel down, Germans, and salute 
in this unconquerable though stricken people 
the Cross of Christ." 

I headed this chapter, "The Triumph of 
Kultur." Ought I to have written rather its 
"Defeat"? Cardinal Mercier, the man of 
conscience, has therein sentenced his Majesty 
the Kaiser, the man of blood . . . 

Yesterday, May the Seventh, was Lusitania 
Day. We commemorated the sinking by 
German craft of that unarmed Atlantic liner, 
when nearly twelve hundred men, women, 
and children perished off the coast of Ireland, 
among them one hundred Americans, and 
Father Basil Maturin, beloved of many of us. 



THE TRIUMPH OF "KULTUR" 301 

I am about to narrate how the United States 
eame to join the Allies. You will grant, dear 
reader, that the sinking of the Lusitania 
forms a perfect transition, not excelled by any 
in the literature of mankind. 



CHAPTER XIV 



America passes Judgment 



THE end of my book now returns to 
the beginning, as a good composition 
ought; and I shall hope to round my ring. 
I began with England, the Treaty of West- 
phalia, the Hundred Days from October 1648 
to January 30, 1649. But I held America 
in reserve and have never lost sight of it. For 
on that side of the ocean as well as on this 
the year 1649 marks a great commencement. 
Then it was that Lord Baltimore, the "pro- 
prietor" of Maryland, drew up and promul- 
gated the Act of Toleration, which allowed 
Catholics and Protestants to live in peace 
under the same laws. This Catholic peer, says 
Bancroft, the standard historian, "was the 
first to make religious freedom the basis of 
the State." A more suggestive expression, in 
view of what kings and secular Governments 
have continually attempted, with troubles be- 
yond calculation, is "the State's incompetence 
in religious matters." Jesuit philosophers of 
eminence — and few names rank higher in 

302 



AMERICA PASSES JUDGMENT 303 

the last three hundred years than the Jesuit 
Suarez, who wrote against King James I — 
had anticipated the limits set by Whigs to 
State authority. Suarez, indeed, has been 
called by some good Jacobite in his haste, 
"the first Whig"; but Dr. Johnson went 
farther back to find him, as we have all heard. 
In any case, even Spanish theologians denied 
the absolute power of the crown, long before 
Cromwell and his Ironsides, at Naseby in 
1645, broke the Caesarism which had got a 
footing in this Island with Tudors and Stuarts. 
We must therefore enlarge our vision of the 
Westphalian period, 1648-1649, and include 
America when we would speak of the new- 
birth of freedom. 

Not, at the outset, Puritan America. Lord 
Acton, alluding to Maryland, points the dif- 
ference. "The Catholic emigrants," he says, 
"established for the first time in modern 
history a government in which religion was 
free, and with it the germ of that religious 
liberty which now prevails in America. The 
Puritans, on the other hand, revived with 
greater severity the penal laws of the mother- 
country." Not Massachusetts but Rhode 
Island claims the honour of inaugurating a 
political peace among the Reformed, from 



304 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

which in due time the American Constitution 
would derive its famous First Amendment of 
1791 : "Congress shall make no law respecting 
an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the 
free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom 
of speech or of the press." At length we have 
reached a direct contradiction, set forth by 
the lawful authority of a sovereign state, to 
the Jus Reformandi granted to rulers at the 
Congress of Westphalia, by which they could 
compel their subjects to believe as the Prince 
ordered them. This 'monstrous regiment" 
of laymen had been at once condemned by 
Pope Innocent X. Now the American Con- 
stitution made it for ever impossible in the 
United States, which were destined to contain 
the largest number of Europeans by descent 
living under a single government, and that 
the government of their choice. 

How these far-off events bore on the con- 
vulsions now, in the year 1917, tending with 
violence towards a solution, will appear from 
the narrative I take up at this point in my 
own way. It is still one of reminiscence. 

In the spring of the year 1901 I was travel- 
ling with a fellow-priest in Sicily and Greece. 
We arrived in Athens on the Greek "Lady 
Day"; and, seated before our hotel, the 



AMERICA PASSES JUDGMENT 305 

Minerva, in Stadion Street, we enjoyed the 
spectacle, which Socrates had witnessed down 
at the Pirseus, or something not unlike it, called 
the "Lampadephoria," the torch-race, from the 
Kerameikos to the Acropolis. What we saw 
was a procession of the Athenian people bearing 
lights, the Army and Navy represented by se- 
lect companies, marching up to the Parthenon, 
and singing as they moved in praise of Hel- 
las, "Hail, dear land of liberty!" The Amer- 
ican, too, sings that refrain. But these men 
of Athens were celebrating, as they did every 
year on that Feast of the Panagia, their 
deliverance from the Turkish yoke. We were 
glad to be there on such a night. And when 
Easter morning came I spent an hour in the 
Parthenon, while the sunlight struck through 
its marble columns, beautiful as lucent in their 
half -transparency. And the wine-dark sea lay 
beneath. There is no language equal to these 
moments ; enough to have lived them. 

Still do the words which Milton translated 
from his favourite among Greek poets, Euri- 
pides, describe Athens and Attica, "pure the 
air and light the soil"; and we pilgrims felt 
our thoughts brighten, 

" 8iCL XaflTpOTCLTOV 

fiaivovres d/3pws aidekpos" 



306 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

short as our stay could be. How shall we 
forget the morning when we found ourselves 
at Marathon, in that garden enclosed between 
the hills and the Aegean, as a carpet unfolded, 
rich with purple and tawny gold of the spring- 
tide flowers? It was like a sculptured bas- 
relief, tinted by the hand of Pheidias, clear yet 
opulent in a light undimmed, unflecked by any 
cloud. Our kind friend, the American Consul 
in Athens, accompanied us, and a young 
American priest who was then studying at 
the university. And we sat down near the 
"Soros," or mound, under which were buried 
the two hundred men of Attica who fell when 
the Persian host was beaten, to the saving of 
the world's freedom. Yes, on that day, nearly 
four-and-twenty centuries ago, 

" 'Let there be light,' said Liberty, 
And, like sunrise from the sea, 
Athens arose." 

Our little band that morning were all con- 
vinced, ardent lovers of the ideals which, in 
his noblest of Funeral Orations, the Athenian 
Pericles held up to admiration, kindling a 
hope never to be quenched. The brave old 
Consul was a soldier who had in the War of 
Liberation been day after day "marching 
through Georgia" with Sherman, to Savannah 



AMERICA PASSES JUDGMENT 307 

and the Atlantic. His fellow-countryman 
from the West could not imagine what an 
absolute Monarchy resembled; he had never 
seen one. My travelling companion was a 
Lancashire man, a scholar and a Radical 
servant of the people, whose lost children he 
gathered in his arms like the Good Shepherd, 
his Master. And I — but which is there of 
her sons, or her sons' sons, exiled from "sad 
Ierne," that could be other than a standard- 
bearer of liberty? We are known, in every 
Parliament and Congress whither we send our 
brothers to speak, as voting always on the side 
of popular rights. And be it remembered here 
that since Catholic Emancipation became the 
source of power — I mean, since the year 1832 
— perhaps not a single Liberal measure would 
have been carried triumphantly through the 
House of Commons except for the Irish 
Catholic vote, "Sad Ierne" has known too 
much and known too long what it is to lie at 
the mercy of a class and a caste. 

And so, musing at Marathon, we could have 
said with Shelley, omitting one word, of which 
in an instant, "We are all Greeks. Our laws, 
our literature, our religion, our arts, have their 
roots in Greece." Nay, dear Shelley, the 
Acropolis stands not hard by Sion's hill ; there 



308 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

is another, a loftier inspiration than "Know 
Thyself," writ above the oracle of Delphi, 
which created the true Humanities, I will 
grant you, but could do no more. The rest 
of that sentence we made our own. We 
talked of the swift wings of Freedom, which 
carried her from this hallowed mound over 
lands and oceans, to the "Island-throne, far 
in the West," to "far Atlantis," whence 
"against the course of heaven and doom" 
she came flying to rescue France from out- 
worn despotisms and to shake all Europe, as 
the tempest shakes the sea. It is a circum- 
stance to be noted. Our thoughts, too, ran 
upon the naval victory of Salamis, in whose 
waters we should be sailing ere long. As by 
and by we took our place in the Theatre of 
Athens, fancy might behold on that high stage 
the battle-piece devised by Aeschylus, wherein 
Persians and Athenians were described so 
vividly grappling with each other for the 
world's dominion that no modern scene could 
give it a stronger semblance. The memories 
of Byron had met us on our way past Misso- 
longhi; we deciphered his name on one of the 
marble columns left of Athena's temple on 
Sunium height. Even to hateful Sparta we 
could allow one moment, that of Thermo- 



AMERICA PASSES JUDGMENT 309 

pylse, and call to it, "Stay, thou art so 
beautiful!" Our voyage through Ionian gulfs 
had brought us, and would take us again, in 
the neighbourhood of the Battle of Lepanto, 
when "apud Insulas Echinadas" the might of 
Christendom, blest and despatched against the 
Turk by St. Pius V, had shattered once for all 
the Moslem sea-power. These were the mus- 
ings of which Marathon could give account on 
that fair morning, in the sculptural landscape, 
where Albion, Ierne, Atlantis, greeted the sun 
as he rode up the sky of Hellas. Our hearts 
thrilled to some echo from Shelley's prayer 
on the lips of dying, but yet unconquerable, 
Greeks — 

"O ye, who float around this clime, and weave 
The garment of the glory which it wears; 
Whose fame, though earth betray the dust it clasped, 
Lies sepulchred in monumental thought! 
Progenitors of all that yet is great! 
Ascribe to your bright senate, oh accept 
In your high ministrations us your sons — 
Us first, and the more glorious yet to come." 

To come they were indeed, on the challenge of 
those latter-day Persians and their ambiguous 
Kaiser, who was Protestant in Berlin, a Catholic 
Charlemagne at the Vatican, protector of Mos- 
lems by his own creation at the Sublime Porte. 
And what share would Atlantis-America take 



310 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

in Armageddon? For my part, I knew from 
the beginning and never doubted. To my 
friend in Athens, the Consul who marched 
with Sherman, I had spoken of the feeling 
with which I once looked down on the green 
slopes of the cemetery at Arlington, Virginia, 
where sixteen thousand of his fellow-com- 
batants in the Civil War had found their last 
resting-place. The American Union realized 
a grander conception of Freedom than Greeks 
would have deemed possible, when its own 
citizens died in their prime that the coloured 
people should not be slaves any more. But in 
our Day of Doom 

"The earth rebels. And Good and Evil stake 
Their empire o'er the unborn world of men 
On this one cast." 

In January 1915 I wrote: "No greater good 
in the political order has been achieved at any 
time than English freedom. I call it English, 
because the other peoples living in these islands 
did no": create or defend its beginnings, and 
from England alone it was carried across the 
Atlantic. It is largely negative" — I pray you 
that detest the ways of Prussianism to attend 
— "setting bounds to State-power, distrusting 
Government, chafing under officials; but all 
these things it does from a positive and real 



AMERICA PASSES JUDGMENT 311 

principle, which briefly we may term Con- 
science. Our freedom, as we know it, is an 
appeal not to custom or to force, but to the 
inward sense of right and wrong planted in 
every man's heart. That such appeals often 
issue in movements fanatical, grotesque, and 
almost insane, I shall not deny. But where 
criticism is forbidden freedom ceases; and 
while we pay the price, often severe, of our 
rooted unfaith in the powers that be, one 
advantage shines out, with a brightness as of 
the morning star amid clouds, on a world un- 
like England. Public opinion, established by 
this English- American tribunal, where each 
and all speak their minds, is in a fair way to 
become the conscience of civilised men. . . . 
Their judgment anticipates history. Riches 
cannot bribe, threats leave it undaunted. 
'This is my throne, bid kings come bow to 
it,' cries Constance in the tragedy. We have 
seen the German Lord of War humbly suing 
at Washington to be favourably heard. But 
at home in England too, if his cause were just, 
he would not lack defenders. . . . The old 
inbred sense of fair-play (which is a word of 
sport, meaning justice) will not be satisfied 
until it has taken all the evidence into account, 
for and against the Fatherland, its rulers, gene- 



312 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

f i 

rals, professors, fighting-men. And no British 
Government can browbeat the jury, or compel 
it to speak otherwise than it thinks." 

That passage, and I am proud to be its 
author, stands on record. If I may keep up 
the analogy, which is in fact something more, 
the foreman of the jury was President Wilson. 
We speak of old habit in law of judge and 
jury, with good ground; but, after all and in 
the long run of public events, the jury, that 
is to say the nation, is also the judge. And 
the foreman collects the votes, to which he 
adds his own. This function Dr. Wilson 
fulfilled to the letter. He listened long and 
attentively to the democratic millions. From 
them he held his mandate. Though elected 
a second time, he was no absolute ruler, but 
just a man out of the crowd to do the nation's 
bidding. I do not call the nation a crowd, 
far from it. There is a vital distinction which 
Victor Hugo taught with his customary pomp 
of words and in strong colours, when a false 
France elected Napoleon III to be its chief 
in 1869 after he had been its executioner in 
1851. The nation is a juridical, a moral 
entity; the crowd comes of chance, the nation 
of law. President Wilson was waiting until 
the nation of America had made up its con- 



AMERICA PASSES JUDGMENT 313 

science. He waited from August 1, 1914, 
down to April 2, 1917. 

And the world's agony went on, growing in 
violence, while the Day of Judgment meted 
out its slow hours. I remember a sad case 
of a poor fellow dreadfully hurt in one of 
the Birmingham factories, whom a friend of 
mine attended as a priest during the paroxysms 
of pain, and how the sufferer cried, "O my 
God, I am ready if you are ready." He could 
not bear it, he looked for death as release. 
So it was with all the unhappy nations which 
the war took and tortured. They yearned 
after Peace. And who was it that kept the 
slaughter going? Baron Burian, the Austrian 
Minister, has spoken, like the Chancellor of 
the Kaiser, a winged word. "The people," 
he said; "what have the people to do with it? 
All they have got to do is to look on." They 
were to look on while Baron Burian diploma- 
tised with all they possessed. But when it 
came to fighting, they would have to work, 
and suffer, and starve, and see their sons 
taken for the war, and receive them back 
wounded, or maimed, or never at all. Have 
these no right to choose whether kings shall 
quarrel unto the death — of their subjects? 
President Wilson was more than a king, the 



314 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

'■ ■ < 

people's choice; therefore he must collect their 
verdict before acting. Meanwhile, though the 
battle of the Marne was decisive of the final 
issue, Kultur went on with its triumphs. 

I am not proposing to describe them. 
Neither will I attempt any summing up of 
the successes and failures of the Allies. These 
things are burnt into our memories. The 
Kaiser's rage was that of a Bearsark, mad and 
homicidal. As he did unto Belgium, so was 
it done to the French departments held by 
his "frightful" armies. This new Constantine 
sacked, burnt, and ruined no fewer than one 
thousand three hundred and sixty Catholic 
churches in the lands he was passing over. 
Russia — who shall venture to speak a word 
about Russia now? The true Russia, the 
German-held Russia; the court with its in- 
credible Rasputin, its irresponsible Tsaritza, 
its vacillating Tsar; the visionary peace- 
parties, and betrayed armies; and, at last, the 
Revolution — here is "stuff of the conscience" 
for future historians. 

I mark four points and leave them: the 
invasion of East Prussia, followed by the 
smashing defeat of Tannenberg, August 26- 
81, 1914, which invasion contributed effectu- 
allv to our success on the Marne and deserves 



AMERICA PASSES JUDGMENT 315 

eternal gratitude; the Tsar's proclamation to 
Poland, promising complete autonomy, but 
rendered of none effect by the permanent 
camarilla which has always ruled and over- 
ruled the sovereign; the utter destruction of 
Poland, for which the Russians must answer, 
being perhaps yet more guilty than the Ger- 
man hosts, and in any case cruel on a vast 
front, with Siberia to eat up the driven 
myriads of Poles when Warsaw and the 
country were evacuated; the sudden, let us 
hope the definite, fall of the Romanoffs; 
and the wonderful but anxious disclosure to 
Europe of a democratic Russia in March 1917. 
Will the old, bureaucratic, Germanised Peters- 
burg, now called Petrograd, be converted and 
live? Or will it, as in other days of crisis, 
hold on until it has got the upper hand of 
Moscow? I know where my affections incline 
me: the Russia which means the people has 
boundless though inarticulate genius, in re- 
ligion, in humanity. May it find its way or 
make it! 

Quitting all else which would keep me from 
my conclusion, I have now to remark that 
it was the German Schrecklichkeit, or system 
of terror, pursued over lands and seas, which 
convinced the long-hesitating American jury 



316 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

to give in the verdict of "Guilty" and proceed 
to sentence and execution. Of this whole 
"State-trial of an Empire," the case of the 
Lusitania will afford to historians the model, 
the argument, and the governing instance. 
The Lusitania was destroyed, deliberately and 
wantonly, on May 7, 1915. Two years after- 
wards, Germany, as was evident, had been 
practising for many months of set purpose 
(and all along as occasion allowed under false 
pretence), the destruction of unarmed vessels, 
allied or neutral, not carrying contraband, 
with entire disregard of treaties, of the Hague 
Convention, and of the human beings in- 
volved. The Central Empires had given up 
all expectation of a decision in their favour 
on land. The invention of the submarine 
seemed to make it possible at sea, by starving 
out England. That remarkable change in the 
situation, by which Britain had raised an army 
of millions, doing splendid and probably de- 
cisive work in France — though very heavy 
losses were incurred at Gallipoli — had driven 
the Germans to their last resource. On the 
submarine campaign they staked their all. If 
it broke every law of international peace 
among neutrals, and of the conduct of bellig- 
erents towards them, that could not be helped. 



AMERICA PASSES JUDGMENT 317 

What were neutrals, what the United States, 
but a larger Belgium? Germany must "hack 
her way through." 

"There are no laws of war," said the 
German War-Book, "but only fear of re- 
prisals." From this it follows that if Britain 
had stopped every means, direct and indirect, 
by which food, materials, and munitions could 
enter Germany, the Kaiser would have had 
no solid ground of complaint. And where, in 
1914, was the neutral Power that could pro- 
tect its sea-going craft from British attacks? 
Had England made use then, as Germany did 
afterwards, of the forces at her disposal, with- 
out regard to aught except her own immediate 
interests, we may very well doubt if the war 
would have lasted a year. These considera- 
tions ought to be carefully weighed. England 
had the power, but she did not judge that 
she had the right, to stop all neutral traffic 
with the Central Empires. She entered 
into agreements, especially in the case of Hol- 
land, Denmark, and Scandinavia, by which, 
as many have contended, her blockade lost 
much of its effect and the enemy was able 
to recover from the defeats inflicted on him 
economically and in general resources. Yet 
Germany, while trampling upon right without 



318 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

scruple, demanded the utmost regard from 
the Allies whom she was poisoning with 
deadly gas; from the Belgians, thousands of 
whom she was deporting as slaves to far 
distant places, where the men would be com- 
pelled to work and starve, the women to 
suffer dishonour; and from America, in the 
very act of breaking the promises she had 
solemnly made. The "Black Book" of out- 
rages committed by her troops is a document 
which brands them with infamy. But of equal 
immorality and lawlessness we are bound to 
accuse Kaiser, Chancellor, and Government, 
after reading the long record of chicane, of 
falsehood, and of smug hypocrisy which stands 
side by side with her catalogue of brutal 
crime. 

President Wilson held on his course de- 
liberately, expostulating with Berlin as out- 
rages came to shock the world, speaking of 
"strict accountability" for them and, at the 
same time, refusing to take any measures 
which could be thought a provocation. Even 
his protests when the Lusitania was torpedoed 
found in Mr. W. J. Bryan, the Secretary of 
State, an interpreter so pacific that Berlin 
took no heed of its warnings. At length, on 
the declaration of a submarine campaign in 



AMERICA PASSES JUDGMENT 319 

which German torpedoes would "sink every 
vessel at sight" which dared to enter an im- 
aginary "danger-zone" created round the Brit- 
ish Isles and in the Mediterranean, it was 
felt that America must act or abdicate her 
claim to be a great Power. The notice served 
upon Washington was framed in terms of 
high contempt. One American vessel might 
ply between its ports and Falmouth once a 
week, provided that its character was shown 
by a harlequin habiliment of stripes "alter- 
nately white and red." And the plea of 
"humanity" for starving Germany, the need 
to finish the war as soon as possible, reminded 
us of Herr von Jagow and his word, "Time 
is our asset." 

Before taking the final step, President 
Wilson had issued a manifesto, in which he 
pleaded with all the belligerents to name their 
terms of peace. The central Empires wanted 
a Conference — the mere holding of which 
would have weakened the Allies, as both sides 
well knew — but the Kaiser would state no 
terms. Most happily for the cause of justice, 
the Allies produced their answer, admirably 
written in French, which laid down principles 
and foreshadowed proposals that left no 
loophole for ambiguities. The Ten Powers 



320 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 



arrayed against the Four had come to a 
perfect understanding. They refused the 
suggestion that both groups were alike "as 
regards the responsibilities of the past and, 
guarantees for the future." Their aim was 
to safeguard the independence of the peoples, 
with right and humanity. What did they 
demand, therefore? Seven points were enu- 
merated, viz. — 

"The restoration of Belgium, Serbia, 
Montenegro, with due compensation; the 
evacuation of invaded territories in France, 
Russia, and Rumania, with just reparation; 
the reorganisation of Europe, guaranteed by 
a stable regime, based on respect for nation- 
alities, and on the right to full security and 
liberty of economic development possessed by 
all peoples, small and great; territorial con- 
ventions and international settlements such 
as to guarantee land and sea frontiers against 
unjustified attack, the restitution of provinces 
formerly torn from the Allies by force or 
against the will of the inhabitants; the libera- 
tion of the Italians, as also of the Slavs, 
Rumanes, and Czecho-Slovaks, from foreign 
domination; the setting free of the popula- 
tions subject to the bloody tyranny of the 
Turks, and the turning out of Europe of 



AMERICA PASSES JUDGMENT 321 

i — 

the Ottoman Empire; lastly, the reconstitu- 
tion of Poland as indicated in the Russian 
Emperor's manifestation to his army. And 
while desiring to shield Europe from the 
covetous brutality of Prussian militarism, 
the Allies cherished no design hostile to the 
German people, whose political existence they 
were not assailing." 

I may subjoin, as if a marginal note, that 
the new Russian Government has published 
an exceedingly noble proclamation, which 
leaves to Poland the entire choice and charge 
of its future destinies. The Polish national 
party, and its consummate leader, M. Roman 
Dmowski, deserve our heartiest felicitations 
on this reward of their efforts in a great 
European cause. 

Now we approach the crowning event of 
the struggle which has gone on, with vary- 
ing fortunes, since the Petition of Rights was 
signed and broken by King Charles I (1628- 
1629) down to the evening of April 2, 1917, 
when President Wilson, his guards about him 
with drawn swords, drove from the White 
House, Washington, to the Capitol, and there 
addressed the Congress in session assembled. 
The occasion was to lay before the nation's 
representatives a motion that they should 



322 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

empower the President to declare a "state 
of war" as existing between the United 
States and Germany. The motives for so 
doing were exhibited in a document which 
will last while America remains a people, 
and which is nothing else than a commen- 
tary, exact and just, on the Declaration of 
Independence. 

To sum up and to close the World's 
Debate, by a judgment condemning autocracy 
in its chief representative the German Kaiser, 
has fallen to President Wilson's lot. Thereby 
he becomes, after Washington and Lincoln, 
the third Founder of the United States. 
Calmly, without passion — "like a priest at 
the altar," said one reporter of the scene, — he 
delivered his sentence to all civilised nations 
looking on, while he drew out the terrible 
indictment of high crimes which Germany had 
perpetrated with malice aforethought. The 
Imperial Government "had put aside all re- 
straints of law or humanity"; and "vessels 
of every kind, whatever their flag, character, 
cargo, destination, or errand, have been ruth- 
lessly sent to the bottom, without thought of 
help or mercy for those on board — the vessels 
of friendly neutrals along with those of 
belligerents." Hence, "the present German 



AMERICA PASSES JUDGMENT 323 

— — — ii^ ——— ———— 

warfare against commerce is a war against 
mankind." Each nation must decide for 
itself how it will meet it. "There is one 
choice we cannot make," said the President; 
"we will not choose the part of submission 
and suffer the most sacred rights of our 
nation and our people to be ignored and 
violated. The wrongs against which we 
now array ourselves are not common wrongs: 
they cut to the very root of human life." 
Then he pronounced the first part of his 
sentence on the culprit. "With a profound 
sense of the solemn, even the tragical, 
character of the step I am now taking . . . 
I advise that Congress declare the recent 
course of the German Imperial Government 
to be in fact nothing less than war against 
the Government and people of the United 
States; that it formally accept the status of 
a belligerent which is thus thrust upon it; 
and that it . . . exert all its power and employ 
its resources to bring the Government of the 
German Empire to terms and end the war." 

But from the facts President Wilson went 
on to their cause. "The menace to peace and 
freedom," so he declared, "lies in the exist- 
ence of autocratic Governments backed by 
organised force which is controlled wholly 



324 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

* 

by their will and not by the will of their 
people." He dwelt on the spying and the 
lying by which, carried on from generation 
to generation, a plan to strike and conquer 
could be engineered; and he said, "We are 
accepting this challenge because we know 
that in such a Government we can never have 
a friend, and that in its presence there car* 
be no assured security for the democratic 
governments of the world." Once more, "the 
world must be made safe for democracy. Its 
peace must be planted upon trusted founda- 
tions of political liberty." He advocated a 
League of Honour, but excluded from it 
Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs by the stern 
remark that "no autocratic government 
could be trusted to keep faith within it." 
He gloried in the new freedom of the 
Russian people, as he had already insisted 
on the restoration of Poland to its place 
among the nations. He looked for the 
liberation of Germany itself. The dedication 
followed. "The day has come," so ended 
this historic utterance, "when America is 
privileged to spend her blood and might for 
the principles that gave her birth and the 
happiness and peace she has treasured. God 
helping her, she can do no other." 



AMERICA PASSES JUDGMENT 325 

" < 

On Good Friday, 1865, Abraham Lincoln 
was murdered in Washington, because he had 
broken the Slave-Power. On Good Friday, 
1917, President Wilson signed the Resolu- 
tion voted by Congress, declaring a state of 
war with Germany. The self-sacrifice of 
Lincoln and Dr. Wilson's supreme act do 
not differ at all in the motive. Both are 
the expression of Eternal Justice, moving tq 
its end by the laws of a great nation and the 
conscience of its chosen leaders. Lincoln's 
victory in death was touching and sublime. 
Its light shines on the sword of Righteousness 
drawn at length by President Wilson, des- 
tined to protect humanity, and justify the 
ways of God to men. 



CHAPTER XV 



The Vision of Peace 



WHEN America joined the League of 
Honour, which Britain had in truth 
founded on August 4, 1914, by challeng- 
ing Germany on behalf of violated Bel- 
gium, the political shape of the future was 
determined. Autocracy must go out, democ- 
racy had come in. That, however, should 
be deemed, not a Revolution in the sense 
of anarchy, but the rising to light and 
power of an established Catholic principle, 
held by St. Thomas Aquinas, Bellarmine, 
Suarez, and our greatest theologians. For 
they have taught that always there is in the 
nation as such a fundamental democracy, 
which indeed is none other than Aristotle's 
"government of free men and equals." More 
justly we might describe it as a Restora- 
tion. I quote Macaulay on this subject with 
pleasure. Reviewing Hallam's Constitutional 
History, he observes that "the Constitution 
of England was only one of a large family. 

326 



THE VISION OF PEACE 327 

i - i 

In all the monarchies of western Europe, dur- 
ing the Middle Ages, there existed restraints 
on the royal authority, fundamental laws, and 
representative assemblies. In the fifteenth 
century the government of Castile seems to 
have been as free as that of our own country. 
That of Aragon was beyond all question more 
so. In France the sovereign was more abso- 
lute. Yet, even in France, the States-General 
alone could constitutionally impose taxes . . . 
Sweden and Denmark had constitutions of 
a similar description." Then Macaulay adds 
most pointedly, "Let us overleap two or three 
hundred years, and contemplate Europe at 
the commencement of the eighteenth century. 
Every free constitution, save one, had gone 
down. That of England had weathered the 
danger, and was riding in full security." 

What had come about elsewhere? Simply 
this, that hereditary rulers had taken to heart 
the political principles of the Renaissance, 
absorbed each in his own person all the powers 
of the State, and called his usurped preroga- 
tives Divine Right. What is happening now? 
The reversal and overthrow of Renaissance 
principles in politics, by a movement derived 
from the Catholic Middle Ages surviving in 
England, transplanted to America, and re- 



328 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

turning thence; thus fulfilling better than he 
dreamt the prophetic song of Shelley, which 
I have partly cited before — 

"From the West swift Freedom came, 
Against the course of heaven and doom, 
A second sun arrayed in flame 
To burn, to kindle, to illume." 

Many are the signs dawning on the watcher 
of stars and seasons that the Catholic Middle 
Ages will return, purified, enlightened, but 
in the essence of their faith and freedom 
unchanged. Let me indulge myself in a formal 
scheme of symbols, not without significance. 

The thing that is coming to pass, amid 
scenes from the Apocalypse of tragedies 
imaged in heaven, is the change from the 
Tribe to the City. Not the supremacy of race 
but the dictates of reason shall henceforth 
rule between man and man. Now there are 
three cities, each chosen by Providence to 
embody and to realise the chief different 
aspects of rational humanity: Athens, Rome, 
Jerusalem — the City of Light, the City of 
Law, and the City of God. To each corre- 
sponds a sovereign ideal: Liberty, Equality, 
Fraternity — the liberty of the individual to 
make the best of himself, the equality of all 
in a common right, the brotherhood of all as 



THE VISION OF PEACE 329 

i 

children of the same All-Father. Thus we 
can regard Humanity as the Church in its 
earthly and social relations; and again, the 
Church as Humanity in its relations to its 
Maker. And while Revelation is an utterly 
free gift beyond man's power, not simply a 
republication of Natural Religion, but all that 
the Gospel claims for it, still grace does not 
destroy Nature but bring it to perfection, 
transfigured with Christ on Mount Tabor. 
The reconcilement of these ideals, each so 
lofty and exacting that it might seem to deny 
the others, is man's task in time; and accord- 
ing to the degree of its fulfilment it is bring- 
ing us nearer to the Vision of Peace. . . . 

To-day Rome is much in my thoughts. 
Or more truly I am in Rome, and in the spirit 
I keep there the anniversary of my ordina- 
tion as a priest on May 11, 1873, forty- four 
years ago. It is also a memorable date for 
my venerated Diocesan, the Most Reverend 
Edward Ilsley, Archbishop of Birmingham, 
who enters to-day on his eightieth year. I 
offer his Grace my respectful homage and best 
wishes. Looking back over my own time, 
marked by such great public calamities, and 
seen to be a turning-point in the history of 
mankind, I discern, it seems to me, that all 



330 THE WORLD'S DEBATE 

its problems run up into one problem, the re- 
conciliation of Democracy with the Catholic 
Church. That the Church and the People 
should arrive at a common understanding. 
That the City should worship Christ in its 
own cathedral. That all ways should meet in 
Rome at the Golden Milestone, as they did 
when "the immense majesty of the Roman 
Peace" girdled the Mediterranean with a 
united realm of one hundred and twenty 
millions no longer at strife ; but then they had 
a master, and now we have done with masters. 
The Athenians are our true ancestors, "bonds- 
men of no Great King," but free men and 
equal. The true modern king may be heredi- 
tary; he shall not be absolute. Autocracy is 
stricken to death; it will be lying under an 
epitaph to-morrow. But Rome survives, and 
round about its "sacred and immemorial 
throne" we desire to see all the nations of the 
earth gathered as a Holy Roman People. 

The vision is for a time, yet my faith is that 
it will come to be fulfilled; and that the war 
which ends absolute rulers closes an era of 
political anarchy to open one of many brave 
and beautiful reconcilements. I shall pray 
for that when I renew my first Mass, — which 
took place at the very Confession of St. Peter 



THE VISION OF PEACE 331 

in Rome — here in the English Church dedi- 
cated to his name. And I shall call to mind 
the great price we are paying for this new age 
of light, liberty, and faith in God. 

A dear price in the lives of dear friends. 
These are my dead soldiers of whom I 
make remembrance at the altar day by day: 
Francis Purcell Warren, George William 
Doogan, Nicholas Angell, William Henry 
Lovell, Harry Winyard, Edward Curwen. 
The good Father be gracious to them, and 
comfort their kindred! Among them were 
to be found gifts and accomplishments of no 
mean order in music, science, and literature. 
They died that England might live. Nay, 
not England alone, but all our youthful 
Commonwealths; and India, that shall be 
taught freedom as the mighty morn gathers 
light; and Belgium, that shall rise again 
glorious; and Poland, whose torn limbs shall 
come together once more in a crimson halo 
signifying her martyrdom turned to triumph; 
and the innumerable Slavs, whom the Spirit 
of God has quickened so that they make 
haste to meet us who are hastening to them. 
And because of these young men slain when 
they were fighting valiantly in this world-wide 
crusade, Ireland shall be a nation once again; 



832 THE WORLDS DEBATE 

and Italy shall enchant our eyes with her 
beauty bred of the Greek sculpture, flushed 
with the rose of the Italian heart; and a way 
shall be found to bring the Holy Father and 
his Rome into a perpetual friendship with the 
people whose greatest glory is the Chair of 
Truth, as their land is the "irremovable seat 
of civilisation." And because our heroes died 
joyfully, casting their lives away with a laugh, 
all these shall begin the better time when 
wealth may mean nothing save the larger 
public service, and labour mean so much as 
the enduring, indispensable, and recognised 
foundation of the State. Our Prometheus 
shall at last be unbound. 



THE END 



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